The Shapes that Fire can Make
by Two Parhelia
Summary: I opened my mouth and cried for you. That was the first time that I did something so you wouldn't have to, that I faced one of your two worlds so you could hide behind my skirt and be spared the pain. Inspired by the remake. I don't own NOES.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The largest moments of my life can be measured in nights: those strange, ethereal spaces between sunrise and sunset, where shadows make-believe they're people and entire universes can brew into existence beneath one's bed… And, so, it only makes sense that you came during the night… one of the darkest nights of the year.

The pinks and purples and navies of the sky had stirred into a flat black, and the stray clouds that had been skidding along the moon were starting to bunch together into a thick cumulonimbus. As the clouds' slippery tails raked shadows over my bedroom windows, I could taste static in the air and feel the hairs on the back of my neck stick up, pin-straight. I locked the window and drew the blinds, leaving only a pale wash of lamplight and the neon buzz of 12:09 on my alarm clock. I slowly shucked my clothes off, and entered the adjoining bathroom, with an armful of towels and a pair of scissors, because, somewhere, in the back of my head, I thought I could do right by you.

As I stacked the bath towels and filled the tub, rain began tattooing on the apartments' roof, before it eddied down to the pavement below, where only women in high heels and faceless Joes wandered during the witching hour. I sank into the bathwater, steam curling off it in lazy contrails, and tried to tell myself I could do it all on my own, because the pangs just beneath my navel were still dull and faraway. I could do it, I concluded, because I didn't really have a choice.

I watched water droplets gather on the tile shower walls, before slipping down, and I pretended they were shooting stars as my first real contraction hit – holding my hand under the sharp nub my belly button had become, I wished on a water-drop-star. And, even as I watched my deep purple stretch marks ripple from your movement underneath, I didn't feel the awe and thrill most mothers describe, that excitement that I was about to usher a new life into the world. All that I felt was guilt and self-blame for the unfairness of your conception, for the fact you were about to be born in a seedy tub with rings darker than my linea negra. I looked over the edge of the tub, where I'd propped my cell phone, and read 12:15… somehow what seemed like five decades had translated into less than ten minutes. I checked it again just to be sure.

The hours strained by just as slowly, and, as the time built up, so did the pains – they weren't quite roaring yet, just sharp and long, and all I could do was fling my head back, cushioned against the linoleum by my ponytail, and whine. My vision quivered from time to time, and, when it grew spotty, I half-hoped that the spots would bloom out and overtake me. The dark, for once, seemed better, better than soaking in my sweat and tears with no one's hand to clamp in mine during the second scariest time of my life. I squeezed a washcloth between my fingers and pretended it was the hand of the loving husband I would never have.

After the third or fourth hour passed, I checked the bottom of my belly – I could cup your skull through my skin as you curled up headfirst, probably choking on placenta as you tried to cry – and I opened my mouth and cried for you. That was the first time, even if it did nothing, that I did something so you wouldn't have to, that I faced one of your two worlds so you could hide behind my skirt and be spared the pain… that was the first time I showed that I loved you. Even if I hadn't painted your nursery, or picked out your name, I loved you, and even if it was a cautious and docile love, it was still there. I knew I had wronged you simply by creating you – you had no choice in who sired you, who conceived you, or who raised you, and the only way I could make up for that was by loving you, and protecting you from the world that, ironically, I was forcing you headfirst into.

I unplugged the drain and watched the water pinwheel down it, before sitting up against the cold ceramic and planting my feet firmly on the rubber bathmat, making chance bargains like "if that water drop beats the other sliding down the wall, then this will be over in half an hour," or "if there's thunder in five seconds, then the baby's father will be a Harvard lawyer with a nice house and no baggage." Instead, the vanity lights over my sink sputtered out and, besides the electronic glow of my cell phone's clock, I was suffused in darkness. I reached forward and ran my hand over the tightened skin of my stomach, as if I was checking for you, to make sure you hadn't scuttled away into the shadows – in some years, I would do the same thing when we went to the playground and you wandered out of my sight. I felt you squirm around, your foot making the side of my belly pucker up; I swore, when I ran my hand over the bump, I could feel your knuckles through my skin.

It was then that I used the rim of the tub to heave myself up and lean against the wall, my back curving inward like a parenthesis against the tiles. Time was slogging on slower and slower, and, suddenly, it felt like the biggest mistake I could make would be having you in a grimy tub, using only a cell phone to light your way into the world. So, I gingerly stepped out of the tub and mopped myself off, wadding up the rest of the towels and feeling my way to the doorknob. My feet inched along the flush of carpet and I reminded myself that, once you were born, I was going to rip out the ugly, green shag and plug in some new, fresh carpet – it'd be a color that _Parenting_ would promise would enhance your social skills, or something ridiculous like that. Of course, I'm sitting on that same, ugly shag as I write this.

I clipped on a maternity bra, pulled a pajama top over it, and practically forced myself into a pair of sweat pants, before spreading towels out on the bed, conveniently forgetting my water had yet to break, and that placenta and blood go hand in hand with birth. All I knew was that you weren't going to be born in a shallow bathtub, because I wasn't a _bad_ mother… even though, deep down, I knew I'd already become a bad mother long, long ago. I propped myself up with an extra pillow, clicked on the old, postage stamp-sized television, bunny ears and all, and spread my legs awkwardly, childishly thinking that I was going to bear you cleanly onto my comforter.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two

I didn't notice at first that the air had flashed an angry red, too preoccupied with the fact the pains had reprised themselves with all the gusto of a runaway freight train. My face was buried into a frilly pillow as I sniveled and furled my toes, fingers clutching my comforter frantically. The clock droned 5:00 AM in its sickly green, and I felt tides of nausea roll in and out, but my bag of water wouldn't rupture and even as the pain crawled up my spine, I didn't feel what so many had coined as the tell-tale need to push. Though my contractions were stacked on top of one another, there was a fleeting moment between without ache, and that was when I saw the second flare of red in the doorway.

_Casablanca_ had been playing statically across the TV screen, before it blacked out, and the sound of thunder petered away suddenly. All I could hear was the familiar _chh-chh-chh_ of two blades rubbing against each other, muffled footsteps.

"Stay out of this," was all I could think to choke out. "Stay the _fuck_ out of this!"

"Nancy-"

"_Get away from me!_" I shrieked, as I felt a foreign tugging near my pelvis.

I felt for you again, hysterically – it was like, if I didn't hold on, you were going to vanish and all I would deliver would be air – and you were completely still. I tried to even my breathing out of worry over how frightened you might have been, cramped in a dark space with your caregiver screaming. I pressed my fingers near my ribcage until I felt your toes, and pushed on them gently, trying to give you some sort of incentive to move lower, or just to move at all, but you were frozen. His outline guttered for a second, before blurring back into the red haze that was beginning to cover the entire room – here and there I thought I saw a pipe or boiler steam.

"_Go away!_" I gasped, frantically. "Oh god, _she's not moving._"

Looking back, I now know that fetal stillness during labor isn't uncommon or worrisome, but I still needed that reassurance, that promise that you were alive and still present inside of me.

I felt something warm and slick slither down my leg, pooling around my ankle, and when I reached out to touch it, it felt sticky and looked pinkish because, I thought, of the light. Then I saw blood concentrated in the middle of amniotic fluid, and I jumped, wiped it on the towels, jerked my head around.

"Help! Please, someone help, I'm pregnant and bleeding-" I hoped vainly that my neighbors would hear me through the wafer-thin walls and care.

"I'm all the help you're gonna need, Nancy-"

"_NO! _ Shut the hell up! Please, someone-"

The air fluttered and I saw a shape thickening in the corner, the brim of his hat coming into focus first.

"I'll kill you!" I insisted senselessly. "I will!"

He moved closer, blue eyes standing out coldly on his pocked and blistered face, misshapen from the warped skin around them.

"One, two, guess who's coming from you," he laughed. "Three, four-"

I hurled a pillow at him, which bounced feebly off of his chest, "_I'll scream!_"

"No one's gonna hear you, sugar-"

"Do _not_ call me that."

I was panting, sweat plastering my hair to my face and glinting in the wicked light. I saw his ungloved hand ghost over my stomach, and before I could scream, it was pressed against me.

"Stop touching m-" but then I felt you squirm again. "S-stop! Stop it, you're scaring her, don't touch me-"

I tried to thrash, but my arms and legs became cemented down against the bed, and my head was yanked back against the pillow by an invisible force. His face was inches from mine and, if I could, I would've bitten him, but all I could do was stare up. He lifted one bladed finger and pressed it under my breastbone, letting a single bead of blood well out.

"Aren't you glad you're not alone?" he sniggered.

I opened my mouth, and I think he thought I was going to answer, before I spit in his eye.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three

His eyes vibrated angrily in their sockets, before his arms shot out in a blur, clamping me in his cratered hands and digging his blades into my left shoulder, leaving bloody stripes. He heaved me up, sending a hot, white flash in front of my eyes and twinges up my back; my head flopped to the side and everything looked like a fuzzy Polaroid.

"You wanna do that again?" he asked. "Do you, you little bitch-"

"No!"

"I said, 'do you wanna do that again?'"

"No…" I said listlessly.

My mind had become overcast and, all of a sudden, I found that I didn't much care who lived and who died. I did love you, I truly did, but during those trying times before and after your birth, the only way I knew how to steal myself against the brunt of everything, was by convincing myself that I didn't care. If nothing mattered, then nothing hurt… At times, I thank God that you didn't inherit that damned trait from me; at times, I'm almost glad that you're more like your father.

When Freddy let me fall floppily back onto the mattress, I felt a tug under my stomach, followed by a flush of liquid spilling out of my birth canal. It steeped through my sweats and into the towels.

"My water," I whimpered feebly.

"How the fuck is that water?"

"What color is it?"

"Why?"

"What's the fucking color?" I demanded.

"Pink."

I was surprised that he, for the first time, complied with answering me, not mockingly, with no expletives.

"Oh, okay… Okay, that's fine. I only need to worry if it's dark red or brown."

He was smirking at the blooming stain on my sweats' crotch, "Those need to come off."

I stared at him in disbelief, "Fuck you!"

"Don't think this is a good time for that, but-"

"Seriously, fuck you! Why are you even here?" I shouted, slightly astounded I could muster up something more than a whisper that wouldn't even rustle a feather. "I know what you're doing; I can read the newspaper, in case you didn't know. I know about the _disappearances_, the _accidents._ You're a monster, a goddamned monster, and that's all you've ever been-"

"Those still need to come off."  
I held back my urge to hurl the scissors across the room into his droopy eye, remembering the last time I'd tried something similar… This was his world…

I shed my sweatpants warily and scooted farther back against the headboard, hanging a towel over myself like a sterile drape, and pretending that the distant pattering of rain was some strange, mechanical whirr coming from medical surveillance equipment. It was telling me that you were okay.

Part of me still doesn't know why I didn't go to the hospital. I'd had one picked out – I'd gotten my ultrasounds and blood tests done there, while wearing a paper, green gown and wondering when a tell-tale black bob would show up in the middle of your scan. Waiting, for the technicians to swap nervous glances, and tell me something just wasn't _right._ But, then, I remember that I didn't dial 911 because part of me was still horrified that, even though your scans were clear, you would be delivered into outstretched, latex hands, and the doctor would see something horribly wrong right away, and they would ask, "do you know the father's medical history?"

As I threw my head back for the millionth time that night and let out a hiss of air, I decided I'd made the right choice… I didn't want anyone to know you came into existence, unless you were okay… That sounds so horrid and selfish, but you have to understand… you just have to.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter Four

You still didn't come.

I "oooh'd" and "ahh'd" my way through the pain, just like the 80s VHS tape I'd fished out of the grocery's dollar bin had told me to – in, out, in, out. Though, I hadn't entirely trusted it at the time – I was convinced that some crazy, 80s-loving fiend had plugged that into the bin for an unknowing mom like me to pick up, to be subliminally driven to wear bright spandex and sweatbands. I'm not sure why I thought this, maybe because after a while it looked so damned comfortable, and sitting in yoga positions made the blood rush to my head. I tried to think about the ridiculous, knit leg warmers and teased hair, ignoring the rib–cracking contractions and the boogieman sitting at the end of my bed.

He was toying with his hat, not looking up until I let out a particularly slow moan, gritting my teeth.

"Don't look at me like that. I'm not trying to get your rocks off," I muttered.

He gave that awful, raspy laugh, and I shut my eyes.

"Go away," I insisted.

"It's not coming."

"_She_ has to at some point. It's only been, what, seven hours? It can take days," I shuddered just as I said that, though, now that I know you, I would've waited an entire lifetime.

"She," he said, like he was tasting the word.

"Yeah, _she_. I mean, it's either a girl or a boy."

"Or both."

I almost laughed, but the anger and the weariness stole that from me, "Yeah… or it could be both, but that doesn't really happen too often, huh?"

He didn't answer, just put his hat back on and rubbed his fingers together, making the knives whisper.

The hours swam and stumbled and labored on, sometimes moving by in a shapeless blur, sometimes seeming to move backwards – I imagined if I'd still been in the tub, I would've seen the water droplets gliding up the tile wall, like comets that had changed their minds.

I became more and more fidgety, picking the remaining flecks of polish off of my fingernails, parting split ends, and, finally, trying to pace more than a foot away from the bed. I spent a lifetime and a half heaving myself up, before swaying unsteadily and wobbling towards the bedroom door.

"Where you think you're goin?"

"To make a fucking sandwich- I don't know! I just have to move my legs."

* * *

The snow was loosely packed, yielding to the door as I opened it; lost flakes coasted in and thawed on my toes, the carpet, the dirty bed. I shivered and took a stray blanket from my wicker chair in the corner, wrapping it around my shoulders, and feeling a sting from where he'd cut me. I'd almost forgotten.

The ceiling melted into an ethereal night sky, with too-white stars blinking down at me and wine-colored clouds changing shape every time the sourceless wind blew. My wallpaper was bursting open as trees and bushes wound out of the plaster – they became thick, turned into a forest, and made my apartment vanish into oblivion. A few dead flowers still stuck out of the snow, but dissolved into gray ash when I toed them. My mind felt disconnected, and, when I looked back, my doorway was a faraway checker square in the wall, which was beginning to be swallowed by undergrowth.

I saw his outline wandering ahead of me, head tucked down.

"Freddy?" I felt delirious, and my knees were starting to buckle under the fresh labor pains. "Freddy, wait…"

I made it a few more steps before my knees gave and I knelt down hard, digging my nails into my thighs – I just remembered I wasn't wearing pants. I laid onto my back, hair splaying out; all I could think about was how there was a wind-chill and the flakes were accumulating and the bathtub was _so much better._

"I'm not sorry," I said, not entirely knowing what I was talking about. "I'm not sorry, and you're not sorry, and it's never going to get any better."

I was crying, the tears crystallizing in baby icicles on my cheeks.

"_I'm not sorry!_"

The floor jumped slightly, the sky rippled away, the trees withered into nothingness, and, underneath me, the snow turned into steam… boiler steam.

"You're not sorry," I heard echo somewhere from the scaffolding that criss-crossed over the ceiling.

The rusty and goldish boiler machinery sighed out more steam that began to roll in a thick layer around me, covering the floor in an eerie blanket. My hair frizzed out, and, suddenly, I knew that strange thing that all mothers seem to know. I spread my legs and bent my knees, and gave the first push.

I don't know when he came to sit on the floor next to me, or when I started to push harder, but as the steam caught on my eyelashes and wet my face, I couldn't tell if I was crying. I wiped my cheeks frantically, because, even then, the last thing I wanted was for you to see me crying. One more push, and I heard you cry… I sat up shakily, and went to scoop you from the soiled floor.

"I'll fight you," I mumbled.

"For what?" he wasn't looking at me.

"For her," I lifted you through the steam, a tiny, pinkish being covered in blood and placenta, your face twisted up as you screamed. "She's the sun."

His knives snipped through your umbilical cord, and I swaddled you in the throw blanket.

"I'll fight you for Dawn."

* * *

_"I will battle for the sun,_  
_ and I won't stop until I'm done;_  
_ you are getting in the way,_  
_ and I have nothing left to say._

_ I will brush off all the dirt,_  
_ and I will pretend it didn't hurt;_  
_ you are a black and heavy weight,_  
_ and I will not participate._

_ Dream brother, my killer, my lover._  
_ Dream brother, my killer, my lover._

_ I will battle for the sun,_  
_ 'cause I have stared down the barrel of a gun;_  
_ no falling._  
_ You are a cheap and nasty fake,_  
_ and I am the bones you couldn't break._

_ Dream brother, my killer, my lover._  
_ Dream brother, my killer, my lover._

_ Dream brother, my killer, my lover._  
_ Dream brother, my killer, my lover._

_ Dream brother, my killer, my lover._  
_ Dream brother, my killer, my lover._

_ I will battle for the sun."_

_ - Placebo, "Battle for the Sun"  
_


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter Five

All I could think about when I awoke with an absence in my abdomen and a new weight in my arms, was your name. Even as I cleaned the blood out of your mouth and rinsed you in the sink, even as I punched in 911 and you rooted for my breast, I just thought about it: _DawnDawnDawn._ And I think the EMTs wanted to call child services the minute they set eyes on me, with you swaddled scrappily in a throw blanket and my legs still discolored by bodily fluids, but, instead, they led us to the ambulance parked outside, its lights throwing around bright flares like synthetic shadows… the kind of shadows _he_ would have made.

At the hospital, they crowned your naked scalp with a little, pink cap, rolled you in a little, pink blanket, and sucked in their little, pink lips against the sour taste of my bad mothering. I insisted the labor pains had startled me from sleep, and, within forty-five minutes or so, you slid into the world without a hitch – I had no warning, no chance to call, only that God-given need to push. I don't know if they believed me… or if they just bobbed their heads in agreement so I would stop churning out excuses and answer their drills – did the father need to be contacted? Did I know how to breastfeed? And, finally, what was your name?

"Dawn," I said. "Her name's Dawn."

"Middle?"

"Gwen." For the grandmother who didn't know you existed.

"Last?"

"Holbrook."

"Father's name?"

I stared doe-eyed at the nurse, "I… I'm sorry, but I don't know."

She gnawed at her lip in disapproval, "No idea?"

"No, ma'am, I'm sorry…"

When she left, her scrubs rustling, I saw them clearing your nasal passages, and giving you vitamin K shots, and monitoring your heart rate; inking your feet, and measuring your skull, and squeezing in eyedrops. All the while you fidgeted and mewed, but you didn't scream, not the way most newborns do, as if they're being yanked in half or throttled; you just whined and your eyes bolted this way and that.

"Dawn," I sighed.

Your name was an apology, a perpetual I'm-sorry for the fact I had you at all, because, even though you were sown and born in night, I wanted to inspire light to radiate from you. Even in the darkest moments, your name could be, I thought, like a sunrise, burning the horizon line orange and chasing the shadows away…

And when they handed you to me, your squinted eyes rolled up, and I saw one was a sharp blue, the other, a washy gray. Those differing tones might even out, they said, as you grew older, but, for some reason, I knew they wouldn't. Somehow I knew you needed a way to let the rest of the world know you weren't like them, even if it was a quiet and demure way… I laugh now at the thought that you would ever calmly lift your eyes to _anyone_, hooded by curly eyelashes, in a _demure_ way.

No, you may not have been a crier, but you were his daughter, and that made all the difference in the world.


	6. Chapter 6

**Thanks to everyone who's reviewed/favorited this story! I truly appreciate it. **

**Note about this chapter: This chapter contains somewhat graphic sex, in case that sort of thing makes you squeamish. And I meant for the sexual encounter to be somewhat jumbled and confusing, to reflect Nancy's perception at the moment.**

**Also, I don't own Placebo's music/lyrics.**

* * *

Chapter Six

Even to this day, I'm not sure why I did it… Maybe because two years had strained by and I was sleeping again, and the gravity of everything had become somewhat muted and faded… time has a talent for doing that, _muting_ things – it can mute people and thoughts and stars, encounters and sunsets and hearts. It can, I find, take the worst figure in your life and gloss him over, and have you lie with him… it can take the shine off of blades and the warping from burns, and make you fall in love.

I didn't fall in love the first time, or even the second time, really. He had begun buoying in and out of my dreams around the two year mark in an indistinct form, like a specter with nothing to say. I didn't even think it was him, at first – my psychiatrist, an overly manicured and stuffy man named Dr. Sinclair, had folded his hands across his pinstriped lap and told me that my peers' deaths had induced trauma. I had created a figment with characteristics right down to his clothes and rasp, so that I could have someone to blame it all on – I was trying, he claimed, to convince myself that Dean had not killed himself, that Jesse had not committed murder. If you can believe it, at one point, your father was pinned as being my "coping mechanism."

* * *

Dr. Sinclair's office was located on the ninth floor of a semi-high rise downtown, with a bleak waiting room and expired magazines. He shared the office with three other practitioners, and their names were all stenciled on golden plaques; there were two receptionists with mean, beady eyes that would glare of their glasses' rims when I arrived late. I always sat, thumbing through a magazine from three months prior, and watched the children with behavioral issues pinching and biting their parents, the recluses hiding in the corner, the old women talking to their dead husbands… and the whole time I wondered, "Why am I here?"

When I sat in his room, with its eggshell white walls and Monet prints, I felt a weird loneliness… like I was in a room with no real life or character, even when he came to join me in his mauve recliner.

"Tell me about Freddy," he'd say. "Will you do that, Nancy?"

"I've already told you about Freddy," I'd respond.

"Have you seen Freddy recently?"

"No."

"He's not visiting you?"

"No."

"And tell me, Nancy, do you sometimes feel like maybe you have other figments, ones that might represent other feelings you have? Freddy is your violent figment; do you have lonely ones, or maybe friendly ones?"

"No."

"On the rare occasion that you 'see' Freddy, what's it like? Does he kill you every time? Or does he just chase you?"

"If he killed me every time, I wouldn't be here," I hadn't meant to let that slip.

"Yes, yes, I see. Now, do you think Freddy is real?"

"I… no," I lied. "No I don't."

* * *

I fell asleep that night in boxers and a gray t-shirt, my hair yanked back tightly in a ponytail, with the lights of the city bleeding through my blinds… and found myself, not long after, in a dimly lit shed, empty besides a table-saw and tarped workbench. I could _feel_ the coarse floorboards beneath my feet, and the glass of the one window as I peered out it – I saw lightning bugs blinking in the evening, overgrown grass, a doghouse, and decorative stepping stones. The house was nearby, whitewashed with brown shingles and French doors.

"_Nancy,_" I heard coming from nowhere. "_Nancy._"

Just as my foot settled in the dewy grass, I was somewhere else: a tight room with a small bed and two windows looking out onto the backyard. But I wasn't absorbing the suburban view; in the corner there was a chair made from planed wood and he was sitting in it, slumped, staring at me with those blue eyes… one of which you would inherit.

"Little Nancy."

"Krueger," and for whatever reason, I seated myself at the end of the bed.

"Even more grown up."

I didn't respond.

"But the same bitch, I see."

"_Excuse me? _Fuck you!" I spat. "Fuck _you!_ You have no idea what you've done to my life! They think I'm _crazy_; I have to see a goddamned shrink! Quentin barely speaks to me anymore, and how many colleges do you think I got into, huh? _None._ I don't have a fucking future! You don't even _know-_"

I felt a tear tremble in my eye, but swallowed it, "_Fuck you._" I couldn't stop saying it.

He laughed at me, as he always would, "I know."

"You've been watching me- of course you have. What else could you possibly do?"

"Always considered giving some candyland dreams to terminal brats."

"_Shut up._ That's not even funny."

And then I was pulled back onto the bed by invisible pulleys, my limbs pinned in place, and he was straddling me.

"Your boyfriend's not pounding you, huh?"

"He's not my boyfriend."

"How about I be your boyfriend, then, huh, Little Nancy-"

I wished I could knee him in the groin, "_Shut up._"

"Okay, okay, you're right. Time's better spent not talking," his hands started, awkwardly, at my shoulders, sliding down to my wrists.

"No, please, I didn't mean to-"

"To what, huh? _To what?_" he lifted me up and slammed me back into the mattress. "Come on, Nancy, it won't matter. If I'm not real this won't matter. You owe me-"

I tried to wiggle out from under him, "I don't owe you _shit._"

He flipped his hat off and I heard his shoes plunk to the floor, "You lied."

"_No._"

"It's not cheating on your boyfriend, Nancy-"

"_Fuck no!_"

"-if it's not real."

"But this is real!"

His hands left my wrists and followed the curves of my hips, "Only we know that."

He lifted the bottom of my shirt, scooting it up over my bra, before cupping my chest, "Only us."

I screamed for the neighbors, though I knew that beyond this house and yard there were probably no other picket fences, just a million shifting dreamscapes with no one to hear me.

"_Shhh._"

He slipped the joining front of my bra between his blades and snipped it open, letting it fall open and unveil my breasts. My shirt was then jerked over my head; he rolled up his sleeves, revealing more burn-cavity-covered skin, so he could feel my body heat when he gathered me in his arms. I felt his disfigured lips on mine and stayed stone cold.

"It doesn't matter, Nancy, it doesn't matter," he kept repeating, kissing me harder, rubbing his rough hands up and down my back.

I whimpered at little when he brushed his palm over a nipple and his mouth discovered my neck, chewing at it; my nipples rubbed against his ugly sweater and, suddenly, I could move my arms. They flew up to hug him closer, despite what I wanted – though, no one had held me that close in so long, no one did much but see through me. We kissed harshly, noses bumping and teeth knocking, and, all of a sudden, I just wanted to kiss someone; I wanted to kiss someone and tell them how hard and unfair the world had been to me, how lonely I was, and how no one had ever loved me right.

"No one cares," I said when he sucked my jaw. "Nobody cares about me."

He held my breasts and I arced my back.

"Freddy, nobody cares," I half-moaned, half-cried.

"I care," he half-groaned, half-lied.

I felt the itch of tear-trails on my cheeks, my pants being ripped off, his teeth on my stomach. I felt air between my legs, a space soon filled by his face, and I sobbed for the things I had wanted and lost, the things I'd dreaded and gained; even with his tongue prodding inside of me, I could hardly feel pleasure or think about sex. I just saw Quentin's face bubble up behind my eyelids, followed by my mother's, by the lives that had been lost.

"I can't do this," I said, even though I would. "I can't."

"It doesn't matter," he said, my shine on his lips, as he peeled off his shirt and his bubbled flesh made friction between us.

I felt like we were two mad people, babbling informalities as we grinded and made our faces wet with my tears.

"_Sucker love is heaven-sent;_

_you pucker up, our passion's spent,_

_my hearts a tart, your body's rent,_

_my body's broken, yours is bent."_

And when he pushed inside of me, I slung my arm over his neck and bucked my hips in time to a rhythm that wasn't there.

"_Carve your name into my arm,_

_instead of stressed, I lie here charmed,_

'_cause there's nothing else to do;_

_every me and every you."_

The room was growing darker, and I could hardly tell where I was touching, or where he was looking; he held me down onto the bed sheets even though I wasn't struggling, kissed me with his entire face, licked the inside of my cheek.

"Little Nancy," I heard him groan. "I waited for you."

"_Sucker love, a box I choose –_

_no other box I choose to use,_

_another love I would abuse,_

_no circumstances could excuse."_

"Why?" I asked, suddenly confused, feeling something pushing in and out of me, feeling the dream world clog my head. "What are we even doing?"

"Fucking."

"I don't love you," I cried deliriously. "_I don't._"

"Good."

I felt some pricking my skin, pulling out blood – his blade raked down my side, though I swore it hadn't been there a minute ago. I couldn't quite grasp where I was, or who was thrusting into me, or why I felt my mind ebbing in and out – it didn't occur to me then that I was beginning to wake.

"This is almost-" I moaned loudly, clawing at his back. "This is almost over."

"Wake up," was all he said. "You're bleeding."

"_In the shape of things to come,_

_too much poison come undone,_

_'cause there's nothing else to do;_

_every me and every you,_

_every me and every you,_

_every me..."_

_

* * *

_

**Song: "Every You, Every Me" by Placebo**_  
_


	7. Chapter 7

**Author's Note: Once again, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has reviewed/added this story to their favorites, I truly appreciate it.**

**Warning: This chapter has explicit sexual content.  
**

* * *

Chapter Seven

The pipes were hot and stung against my skin, leaving temporary, red welts across my naked back, and I kept accidentally throwing my head back, making it recoil painfully off of the ducts. He reached his hand behind my head and cradled it awkwardly, before pinching my neck between his teeth in a silly attempt to make it look like he hadn't tried to help. It didn't matter – my arms were wrapped around him, my legs locked around his waist, ankles folded.

We rocked and bumped messily against each other, glazed with sweat, and whenever he leaned in to kiss me, it tasted brackish and wrong. There were times when our eyes would link together and just stare with glassy, limp gazes, no I-love-yous or I'm-glad-you're-heres between the blinks and lids – we just fucked because we could. He got satisfaction and I got… well, I'm not sure what I got. It was like the physicality of it didn't quite register with my brain – it felt amazing, but _I_ didn't feel amazing.

One of his hands skated down to hold my ass, and, with the other supporting my back, he knelt down, letting me ride high, so that he could sink his face into the valley between my breasts. I whined and grated my nails on his back, pulling off dead skin and scabs; he thrust up harshly in response, making my head swing back and my eyes dampen.

"Say it," he barked.

"What?" I asked blearily.

"Tell me to fuck you."

"You already are," I said dully.

"Say it."

"Fuck me, Freddy."

Then I felt something scour down my back, sending a terrible shock through me, parting my skin and making thin rivulets of blood flow down, gathering in the dimples above my ass.

"_No!_" I yelped, pulling back to get off of him.

"_Say it!_" He yanked me down.

"_Fuck me! Fuck me, Freddy!_"

I started humping him frantically, screaming more for show than anything else, and he breathed out a low moan into my shoulder, twisting my nipples between his thumb and forefinger. His hands folded into my armpits to hold me, fingers massaging my shoulder blades; he looked up at me and I saw a foreign flash in his eyes.

"Tell me you love me," he demanded suddenly.

I didn't answer for a minute, "Why?"

"Because then I'll know that tomorrow night the same hot bitch will be saying my name," he exhaled against my right breast. "Say it."

"I won't mean it."

"God knows I don't want you to, kid. But the more you say it, hell, maybe the more you'll think you _mean_ it," he paused to grunt. "That's how you get 'em coming back. You _take charge_ of their stupid, little heads."

"Fuck you. All I love is _fucking_ you," I lied, but with a theatrical-pant that made it sound _so_ real.

"Oh, god," he almost yelled. "_Yes,_ you are my type of girl, Nancy. You _are._" He shoved himself up into my even harder and I shivered.

I could almost feel his cock's pulse inside of me, before he emptied into me what might of have been the beginnings of you. He threw me off just as I pretended to come.

* * *

There was just _something_ about lying nude on the warm, metal floor of the boiler room, vapor hissing down my form, condensing on my body's downy hair. I rested my head on my arm and watched him pace, already dressed in his ugly sweater and black pants; his shoes clomped.

"So, who's this hot bitch that's been saying your name?"

"Huh?"

"You said a bitch has been calling your name. Tell me about her," I joked.

"She's nothing special."

"Oh?"

"Nah," he pulled his blades along a pipe and they sparked. "But she's got a helluva of a cunt."

I laughed, "Yeah, sounds like the asshole I've been riding. Wouldn't say a word to him if I could help it, but he's okay at fucking."

I heard him laugh in that callous way, the burn of orange light outlining him, "I'm telling you, babe, no one around here's worth settling down with."

"Always pegged you as a family man," I said sarcastically.

"I'm talking about you, Nancy-girl."

I rolled onto my side, "There's no point in 'settling down.' People just pop out kids, fight, and die. It doesn't matter."

"Nothing matters, Nancy-girl."

I pursed my lips, "No… no, I guess not."

He sat down behind me and tapped my side with his blades; I stiffened and he snorted.

"Look at little Nancy, all grown up… nothing more than a whore that's scared of the hand that feeds."

"I'd be scared of anyone who's got a knife on me," I snapped.

"Not if I was _Quentin._"

I sat up abruptly, "I don't want to talk about Quentin."

He settled his face against my shoulder, his blades on my thigh, "But I do. When's the last time you let him have a piece of your pussy, huh?"

"Fre-"

"Don't worry, kid, I'm not too possessive, long as you come around back to me a little more than once in a while."

I reached back and felt the back of his boiled skull, taking off his fedora, "Not for a while." I put his hat on and broke up my vision with the brown brim, "Not for a long while."

"You're my favorite, Nancy. Always were."

"You don't say…"


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

It was clockwork, continuous and on the mark and grimy to the gears: every night I went to sleep, only to wake in witching hours, covered in a lacquer of sweat, my scrunchy broken from my hair and gluey fluids between my legs. In some ways, it was out of my control: my sleep was not my own, not even when I was floating on the very edge of it… but in others, I complied without complaint; I bucked how he wished and whimpered how he liked and said what he wanted, sans "I love you." There were even peculiar times when I'd initiate it, when neither of us would say much of anything, and I would slink over and fasten my mouth to his… and it wasn't until I started working that I began to notice the changes.

* * *

I got a job during it all, working at a pastry shop that was hard-up for employees, where I slowly learned to temper and layer, to beat and frost… Every morning I woke up disheveled, with bluish clouds of bruises on my hips and thighs and under my breasts, before hauling out of bed and standing under the shower nozzle until the water chilled. I always dressed in haste and jogged down the blocks, keys tinkling in my pocket as I went, because for some hours a day there was no time to simmer in all of my misgivings and what-ifs. People _needed_ me to be there, to pull apart yolks and egg whites, to sift flour and flute cream between Napoleon wafers; I learned how to bake to the tune of cash registers opening and closing, café crowds puttering in and out, all while feeling like I had some sort of purpose, no matter how minor or trivial.

* * *

I didn't tell Freddy about my newfound purpose, or the strange fact I was felt less and less inclined to pump myself on top of him, though he drew his own conclusions.

"Bitch, you know I said I wasn't possessive as long as you came around _more_ than once in a while."

"You can make me come around whenever you want," I'd argued.

"I didn't mean it literally, kid."

"I'm not even dating anyone!"

"No, you're just fucking somebody-"

"I am _not! Jesus_, you say you don't care, but you're grilling me-"

As soon as I said that, Freddy had me by the collar and was slinging me against a burning pipe.

"No, see, _now_ I'm grilling you," he growled.

I spit up a dime of blood and squirmed against his grip, feeling something stiff rub against my back, something he pushed against my rear end and groaned about.

"I don't want to do this, Freddy," I hissed. "I mean it."

He laughed, "Oh, _really?_ Do I get a spanking if I keep going-"

"I got a _job!_"

"…Huh?"

"I got a goddamned job, that's why I'm acting weird, okay? _Let go of me._"

"Not taking old Quentin to the sack, then?"

"_No,_" I snapped. "I'm working in a freaking pastry shop."

He snorted loudly, "Pastry shop?"

"Yeah, I make cakes and shit. Why is that even funny?"

"Doesn't seem like you, kid," he eased his grip and let me relax against the cooling pipes.

"Yeah, well, I like it. It's something I'm actually good at."

He started sucking the back of my neck, "I know something else you're not half bad at."

I shrugged him off, "I said _no, _Freddy."

He re-gripped my arms, "And I said _yes._"

He jerked me forward and whacked me against the pipeline, so that my teeth vibrated and I coughed more blood.

"_Please-_"

"Please? Please what?"

"Freddy, why do we always have to fuck," I asked pathetically. "Why can't we just talk?"

"Oh, you wanna _talk._ Okay, let's _talk,_" he pushed me down on my knees and I heard unzipping. "Now, you know you can't talk with your mouth closed."

"Freddy, don't do thi-"

He tipped my head back and squeezed my mouth open, making my jaw pop, and I squinted tightly.

"Fre-"

But before I could finish, he drove his length into my mouth, threading his hands aggressively through my hair and forcing my head to bob. I choked and retched, but he continued, my mouth watering and making me nauseous.

"Fer-fre-dd-"

"_Shh,_" he coaxed in a sickly-sweet manner, pitching into my face faster. "Almost done."

But he wasn't, and I knelt, humiliated, until he drained himself down my throat, making me heave wetly, throat burning from the friction and brute entry. When he released my head I flopped flaccidly to the floor, unable to focus on the whorls of gas and shafts of orange-tinged light; all I saw was his silhouette crudely zipping up its pants.

I folded in on myself and cried dryly, throat smarting, eyes bleary, realizing that it didn't matter what useless things came about in my life – a new job, a new man – there was no way out of the terrible web I'd helped plait. I was Freddy's girl because he said so… I was Freddy's girl because I didn't know how to be anything else.


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter Nine

He didn't visit me after that… not for a long time.

For a while, I cried and weltered around in the memory, stewing, damning myself for having had even the slenderest thought that Freddy and I had formed some sort of nameless union that promised he wouldn't cross the line… I was naïve – if he could kill a human being, why would he have qualms about invading one? Still, I believed that fate was dealing me a good hand, that Freddy had, one way or another, been purged from my life, an organ transplant rejected from the host-body. Little did I know, the damage was done – I feel that's a cruel way to state it, calling your conception "damage," but at that point in my life, the mounting nausea and fatigue were the single most horrifying ailments in the world.  
At first it was nothing, I was simply waking up later, I thought, because the sky had turned a hoary color as the autumn leaves flared red, and the sun's bands of light had become lackluster as they split between my blinds. No, I suppose I didn't think much of that, or my waist, which seemed puffier… It wasn't until that one day at work, when I was standing over the granite countertop, watching a mixer whirring and fluffing batter up into soft peaks, my ponytail strapped back in a hairnet. As I watched the mixer blurring faster and faster, turning into a hurricane that could fit in my palm, I felt a sweep of sickness, and bolted across the room. Unfortunately, I didn't quite make it to the toilet, vomiting on the wall instead.  
Hillary, a stocky girl in her mid-twenties, who mostly manned the cash register and answered the phone, flew into the kitchen in a tizzy.

"Nancy! Nancy, what happened?"

I stared at the mess, "I threw up."

"Jesus, on the wall, Nancy?"

"I know, I know, I'm sorry. I couldn't make it to the toilet in time."

"Do you think you have the flu? Should I throw that batter out…"

"I didn't puke in it, Hillary," I argued.

"I know, but if you're sick-"

"I'm not-"

"You threw up! On the wall!"

"Yeah, it's on the wall, I get it," I snapped. "Wanna say it five more times, just in case I forget?"

"Nancy, you've been coming in late for the past _week,_ which is bad enough, but now you're getting sick where we make the food and it's just-"

Then it connected – fatigue, nausea, the fact that the closest I'd gotten to a period in about two months was a few brown spots.

"Hillary," I cut in. "I think I need to go home."

"Well, I mean, yeah, that's what I'm trying to tell you," she snapped in return.

* * *

I didn't go home; instead, I walked down a few blocks to the closest pharmacy, and found myself lost in a single aisle. It felt like the incandescent lights were glowing ten times too brilliantly and everyone in the store was ogling me – _look at that girl, look at the terrible girl and the terrible thing that she's done…_ At any other time, I would've found it funny that all of the condom boxes – ribbed, lubricated, and the whole shebang – were lined up neatly next to the pregnancy tests, which in turn were next to diapers, powdered formula, and binkies: a chain for the mistake-makers like me. I tried to collect myself and took two, cardboard cartons of pregnancy tests off of the shelf.

The cashier hardly looked up from picking her nails when I slapped a twenty dollar bill on the counter, before she punched in the item numbers and slid the change back to me.

"I know the perfect guy who can fix that," she said vapidly.

"Fix what?"

"What you're testing for."

"Oh… um, no thanks, it's really not even that necessary. I'm just doing it in case," I snatched up the plastic bag and rushed out.

* * *

I picked a spot on my bathroom ceiling – a crack where baby spiders had spiraled out the summer before – and waited, the two tests on the linoleum by my feet, until I was ready to read the sticks' tiny screens. A few moments later, I picked up the first one and saw a faint, faint pink cross's outline blushing into life – _they're not always accurate, and besides, it's too pale_ – I picked up the second and that time there was no faint pink cross, only a bold, neon one. My throat hitched before I screamed and flung it across the room, letting out a sob as it bounced off of the wallpaper.

"_No, no, no, no!_" I pulled myself up by the sink's basin and threw off my shirt, turning sideways, desperately trying to ignore the slight swell. "Fat, just fat, it's just fat, Nancy! For God's sake, you work in a _bakery!_"

"Dammit, _Freddy!_" I screamed suddenly, digging hysterically through my medicine cabinet, not really looking for anything. "_You bastard! You knew this would happen! You fucking knew!_"

I threw a bottle of Advil on the floor and watched its turquoise, gel pills scatter around my feet; I knelt down to pick them up… and cried until my tear ducts ached instead.

* * *

I don't know if he heard me screaming his name through whatever veil separated us, or if he had simply grown bored and restless, but, either way, my dreams took me to the boiler room not long after that day. The smell of factory oil and burning seemed fouler and stronger than ever before, and I made my face a frozen lake, holding back the fears trying to surface by growing a thick sheet of ice over my true expression.

"Little, Little, Little Nancy," I heard him sing. "How I've missed your _tits._"

I bristled.

"What's wrong, hm?" I felt him behind me, sweater pressing against my back, hands straying to my hips. "Was last time a little too _hasty?_"

"Fuck you."

He groaned into my neck, "Just what I was thinking-"

I whirled around to face him, "I will _never_ fuck you _ever_ again!"

He tightened his hold on my hips and ground his crotch against mine, pushing his malformed lips against my cheek, before moving over to my mouth.

"You can't do this," I managed to sputter.

His hands were tracing my shape underneath my shirt now, hovering momentarily on my rounding sides, "Puttin' on a little, huh, Nancy?"

I sucked in sharply, feeling tears preparing to perforate their way out.

"Oh, _shhh_, it's okay. I like a little meat." I felt his erection pushing on my hipbone.

"It's not fat," I squeaked.

He squeezed my sides and grunted, "Doesn't feel like muscle, Nancy-girl."

"Will you just _stop_ fucking with me, already? Say it!"

"Mmm, what?" he started to suck along my jaw.

"That you know…"

"Know what?"

"You know that I'm pregnant."

All at once, his face caught chill from mine and stopped moving, though I could feel his hot, wet breath.

"_Pregnant?_" he pushed me back so I almost tumbled over the railing. "Knew it, you little whore, I _knew_ you were fucking someone else! So, you've gone and gotten yourself knocked up, huh? _Who's the lucky bastard?_" he shouted. "That little asshole, Quentin, eh? Didn't know he had it in him, the little fucker-"

"He didn't!"

He slashed at the railing with his blades, "_Then who the fuck is it? Random play?_"

"No…"

"_Fucking answer me, you little bitch-_"

"_It's yours!_" I screamed back. "_Not Quentin's, not anyone else's! Yours, yours, yours!_"

His arm stopped midair, "You think I'm _stupid?_"

"Wha-"

"That's not even possible, I'm not some-"

"Some _what? Human?_ A person that can make _mistakes?_ You're sure as hell not almighty, Freddy, despite what you think. This is as much your fault as it is mine!"

"I didn't put any bun your oven, kid."

"What could I possibly gain from lying about this?"

"I wouldn't want to fuck you anymore."

"I have pregnancy tests in my bathroom, they're positive, and I haven't had sex with anyone but you for a long time! It's _yours._"

He stared at me and then, just uttered, "Wake up."


	10. Chapter 10

**Author's Note: Again, I want to thank everyone for their lovely reviews and for reading my story - it's wonderful to know that people enjoy and think about my writing. Thank you!**

* * *

Chapter Ten

He didn't vanish entirely after that – I could still feel him on the border of my dreams, a ghostly presence waiting… for something, or nothing.

* * *

By four months you made a small knoll underneath my shirt, and, on my lanky form, it didn't go unnoticed.

"Um, Nancy," Hillary had begun uneasily. "Is there something you need to share with, you know, a co-worker or something?"

"What?" I asked absentmindedly, peppering pastries with cocoa powder.

"Nancy, are you, you know… pregnant?"

I took in a slow breath, "Why?"

"Nancy, this is something you need to share with the boss-"

"Why?" I repeated.

"You need to discuss maternity leave-"

"I'm not keeping it," I said flatly.

"Oh… but Nancy, you can't just work here until you give birth in the flour-"

I held back a strange, new urge to finger the bump, "Oh."

She leaned forward to look at my glazed expression, "Are you okay?"

"Probably not," I turned to leave and place the pastry tray in the chilled, glass display case.

* * *

I re-latched the case's door and, as my eyes broke the top of the counter like a sunrise, I saw that the shop, oddly, was unoccupied; cakes were left half-eaten on their china, napkins were crumpled as if they were still being held… but then, I realized that the street outside was _also_ empty, and, on what had been a windy November afternoon, the tree boughs were suddenly stationary. Vines of shadows began to climb out of the corners, up the wall, across the ceiling.

"Freddy?" I asked sickly.

I saw the outline of a man leaning in the doorway blink for a second, then he was closer, closer, and closer… leaning on the counter, becoming defined.

I took a startled breath, "What do you want?"

The air guttered, boiler pipes popping from the walls, lacing through the floor, hanging, slack-jawed, from the ceiling. The light was darker, a grim orange.

"Can't a guy visit his girl at work?" he asked sarcastically. "Or would that be inappropriate on the job?"

"Go find another silly girl to screw," I spat venomously. "I'm not some dumb, pretty thing anymore."

When I turned on my heel to leave, my nose bumped against a cement wall, an unnatural, red light was leaking from its cracks, steam breaking free with it.

His hooded, blue eyes stared at mine, "You look the same to me."

I stepped back, against the backdrop of red vapor and lifted my apron, turning to the side, scowling, "Yeah, and how about now?"

He made his way behind the counter, setting his hands on my shoulders and resting his nose against my forehead, "The same."

The counter melted into the floor and my apron crumbled away.

"Why are you here?" I caught a glimpse of something brownish and flaky on his blades, near my neck.

"I live here," he breathed. "What are _you_ doing here?"

I stepped closer, his itchy sweater scratching my face when I burrowed against his rigid chest, and his arms enclosed me slowly, awkwardly. My tears stuck to the off-color fabric, and I could almost hear a heartbeat – maybe it was an echo just leaving his ribcage, created from when his heart had been alive… kind of like how stars are long dead by the time their light reaches us.

"Freddy?"

His hands were scrunching my shirt up as they fisted its fabric, his blades no longer feeling present, and he kept making a strange huffing noise against my hair.

"I'm not keeping it," I whispered.

"Good."

"I don't want it."

"Good."

"I think I'm lying."

"I know…"

"_If I could tear you from the ceiling,_

_(I know the best have tried)_

_I'd fill your every breath with meaning,_

_and find the place we both could hide."_

"What are we even doing?" I asked, realizing all too late that I sounded exactly how I had the night he first thrust into me.

He laughed, remembering, "Fucking."

"Oh, really? This is a way I've never tried," I prodded quietly.

"It's a way that can't get you pregnant."

I laughed, too, "We should've tried this earlier."

His hand was running up and down my spine, my slightly-swelled stomach pressing into his, vapor spiraling around us in columns.

"_Don't go and leave me,_

_and please don't drive me blind;_

_don't go and leave me,_

_and please don't drive me blind._

_You don't believe me, but you do this every time;_

_please don't drive me blind."_

"I don't love you."

"I know."

"And now I think I'm lying again," I admitted.

"I know."

I was squeezing tighter, his hands moving up to clench my hair, and I thought, for a young, green moment, that it could always be like that – that Freddy had tapped into some layer of himself no one knew existed, that I could have a life, even if it was separated from the conscious world. He was kissing along my hairline and circling his thumbs against my shoulders.

"_I know we're broken,_

_I know we're broken,_

_I know we're broken._

_If I could tear you from the ceiling,_

_I'd freeze us both in time,_

_and find a brand new way of seeing,_

_your eyes forever glued to mine."_

I was so wrong, though… I was so wrong and young and stupid, though I felt true and old and wise. With my face against his trunk, I thought that you, the life we'd seeded, could be a reflection of something… God, I was a child.

"_Don't go and leave me,_

_and please don't drive me blind._

_I know we're broken."_


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven

I'm so sorry that I followed the cries that night, because her eyes caught me just as I tried to saturate myself in the shadows… and as she laid belly-down on the floor, her hand shot out towards me, fingers seeking my hold, but only getting a handful of that stinking, boiled air. Her dishwater hair hung in scraggly strands in front of her face, and, when I looked back at her hand, I saw that her fingers were shiny with blood from trying to plug up her slit ankles.

"Mmm-muhh," she sobbed out, blood staining her teeth, dribbling down the pointed chin of that heart-shaped head.

When she bucked her head up, crawling towards me, I saw that she had a widow's peak, green eyes, soft features – I wondered whose they were, her mother's or her father's? Would someone soon be printing sheet after sheet of "Have You Seen Me?" posters, reading them over and over again with those same green eyes? Was her face laminated and perky in someone's wallet? Would someone somewhere be so pained and hopeless, that they'd one day say they had never had a daughter at all?

"Mmmm," she gargled, gripping my ankle as I stared down, dumb and comatose.

Then I felt something, a quick jab so tiny I almost didn't feel it at all, like a bubble popping inside of my womb, and that's when I snapped back into the dream-reality and knelt down, hooking my hands under her armpits and pulling her down the steaming hall. She spat up blood on my nightshirt – it was a dark, deep red, the sure sign of a belly gash. I heard him clomping towards us, and I felt around under her shirt, finding a hot and tacky canyon below her navel, leaching out more blood. She bawled as I limped slowly with her, until I fell with her on top of me, an awkward heap of sobbing skin.

"Wake up," I begged her. "Please, just wake up and it'll be okay."

I knew it wasn't true, I felt the way her blood was marinating my pajama pants, warming my leg; her Achilles tendons were draining themselves out.

"Oh, God, I'll do anything," I sobbed, combing her hair out of eyes and tracing her widow's peak, where her cheekbones arched, her funny bottom lip, which was so much bigger than the top. "_I'll do anything._"

She reached up with her gooey fingers and touched my face drunkenly.

"Mmmuhmm."

"Yeah," I lied, squeezing her hand. "It's okay, Mommy's here."

His shadow stretched over us, a strap of man-shaped tar; I heard him laugh gravelly.

"_Wake up, wake up, wake up,_" I begged harder, pushing my cheek against hers. "_Wake up, wake-_"

I didn't even realize he was squatting in front of us, not until he pushed my face back and reached his hand in front of her throat, feeling for her jugular.

"_Stop!_ _Please, please, just let her wake up-_"

"No point, Nancy-girl-"

"She can be okay," I insisted. "_She can be fine!_"

He tipped my face up to him, "Not this one."

I yanked my head away and fell back, kicking frantically until I made contact with his groin.

"You fucking cunt-"

"_Wake up!_" I screamed over him, before he could lurch on top of me; I rolled her roughly off of my lap, shaking her madly. "Wake-"

And then, with a strange _whooshing_ noise, she jerked awake… and was gone.

* * *

I was left, kneeling in front of him, her blood hardening on my hair, as he just stared at me for a second… before his arm blurred forward and a closed fist connected with my jaw.


	12. Chapter 12

**Again, thank you all for the reviews and support!**

* * *

Chapter Twelve

I started scanning the obituaries every day before work, tying my apron while squinting at the small print, looking for a black and white face with that same widow's peak for my dream. Sometimes, when I was sure she wasn't there, I would read any other teenager's obituary, where grieving parents would try to sum up their child's life in a brief paragraph, talking about how they loved lacrosse, or painting, or just being alive. I never did find her, though I am quite sure she died that night, while another part of me prays her parents found her, slick with blood like a newborn, and were able to rush her to the hospital, before she bled dry. I think often of how I almost veiled myself with the shadows and watched her die, instead of at least trying to save a life, how feeling you kick for the first time had made me change my mind.

* * *

I dialed Quentin a few days after the incident, asking him over for coffee (even though I'd purged myself of it after I'd found out about you) and some catching-up. It seemed appropriate – all arguments and hurt feelings, I thought, could be fixed over a pot or two of coffee… but when I opened the door holding the already tepid pot, I knew I was being silly – he didn't step in, just stared at my distorted frame and flapped his lips soundlessly.

"_Nancy?_"

"Hi…"

"What- what happened to you?"

I laughed weakly, "Well… you know."

"Jesus, Nancy, you could've warned me."

"I know. I'm sorry… I just… didn't think you'd come if you knew, honestly."

"Nancy, just 'cause things didn't work out-"

"Because of _me._"

"No, because of _both of us_, doesn't mean I don't still wanna see you. I do. Promise," he said awkwardly.

"Okay, well… you wanna come in?"

"Oh, right, sure."

I set the coffee pot on the table and fumbled through the cupboard for ceramic mugs, while he pulled out a chair and sat uncomfortably in silence. The mugs clacked on the hardwood table and I smiled uneasily, pouring him some, hoping he didn't realize the lack of steam.

"Uh, Nancy… I think this coffee's cold."

"Oh… is it? I can just heat it up in the microwave really quick, and-"

"Nancy, is something wrong?" he probed gently.

"I just wanted to see you…"

"I don't want to seem, I don't know, _harsh,_ but you've kind of been ignoring me for a few months, and, out of the blue, you invite me over for coffee that isn't even hot. I just want to know what's wrong."

I glared at my buckled reflection in the coffee pot, "Nothing."

"Nancy, if you need someone to talk to, I'm always here, no matter what-"

"It's Freddy," I interrupted softly.

"_What?_"

"He's back… he has been for months. I just wanted to, I don't know, _warn_ you."

"_You've waited this long to tell me?_"

"I'm sorry…"

"_Why_ did you wait?"

"Because I didn't think it was a problem, _okay?_ But the other night- the other night I _saw_ him slice up this girl and I helped her to get away, but God, Quentin…" I hiccupped. "God, I don't think she made it unless she woke up in a fucking hospital."

He was studying me as I nervously fretted over my hair and glanced frantically around the kitchen, before he stood up and pulled the chair squeakily across the cheap, tile floor, sitting next to me and rocking me in that way he knew I had always loved to be rocked.

"It's okay, Nancy, we've beat him before," he soothed.

"If we beat him then why is he back?"

He nuzzled into my hair, "Shh, it's okay, it's okay, we've got him."

I knew Quentin was lying to comfort me, and holding me, a sniveling pregnant girl, because that's who he was, who he had always been.

"Nancy, can I ask you something personal?"

"S-sure…"

"Do you know who the father is?"

"Why?"

"Because he needs to know that his kid might be in danger-"

"Freddy won't hurt the baby."

"Freddy's a monster," he insisted. "He doesn't care if a girl's pregnant, or if he has to kill a baby to get what he wants. _He's a monster._"

"He won't hurt the baby because he knows it makes me miserable."

"Why would he kn-"

"Because it's fucking _his! _Because carrying it every day is a hell he couldn't hope to make out of a dream, and I have to keep reminding myself that it's part of me, so I don't... do something horrible…"

He didn't bristle or go rigid… no, Quentin just held me and when my eyes started to dribble, so did his – I felt tears snaking down my scalp, and it made me remember that I loved him.

* * *

He didn't leave that night, instead, he slept on the floor, wrapped in throw blankets that would one day sheathe you – he wanted to be there in case I screamed in my sleep. Lying, wrapped in my starchy sheets on a too-flat pillow, and listening to his snoring, I realized that there are some things that cannot be changed, that cannot be reversed or trimmed back or re-glued, that cannot be fixed. No matter what Quentin said and did for me, no matter how much he loved me, I had thrown him away, a rag flung into the sea as I let a nameless storm take over me, my boat, my body. I cried myself to sleep that night, knowing that if Quentin knew what was best, he wouldn't give himself back to me, and that if I truly loved him, I would keep him at arm's length

I cried for you, too – I knew that when you came, you would probably be born into a bladed claw, because my own hands would be too busy wiping away selfish tears to catch you.


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen

The swamp smelled distantly of sewage and rotting wood, its water thick and hairy from algae, mangrove trees surrounding every quagmire and bar of land. I found myself in the shallow end of one quagmire, mosquitoes bouncing off of my skin and the water, popping like acne when I swatted them. Jelly ropes of frog eggs drifted on the surface, and I recoiled, accidentally sticking my hand in a sludgy pile of what I prayed was only mud; my pajamas were weighted down by swamp water and I struggled to stand, cupping my stomach and using a nearby tree for support. Cicadas and crickets buzzed in the tall weeds and small frogs chirped, plopping into the filthy water. I moved unsteadily to stand on a stretch of land capped by mushrooms and other fungi, the light around me paling at an abnormal rate, making me hurry my steps and stumble on the slippery banks. I felt a strange tingling on the back of my neck, a radar trying desperately to tell me that, not including the life maturing inside of my womb, I was not alone.

I tried to skip over an indentation that joined two quagmires, the sludgy water oozing through it like it was a baby-channel, and lost my footing, both feet getting stuck in the mud... except, the mud continued to suck on my legs, drawing me down to my shins, my waist, my chest. I grabbed for handfuls of the slimy mud, only to have it harden and divide, spilling between my fingers in a wave of maggots – I screamed and yanked my hand away, the ooze reaching up to my throat. Closing my eyes, I tried to suck in a last gasp of air and failed, the begrimed and fecal mud swamping my mouth, plugging my nostrils, sealing my eyes shut.

The water was too grainy for me to see properly – I could make out waving, underwater grasses, blooms of mud, and the shadows of skeleton fish. All I could think about was not only my oxygen, but yours – could a fetus survive such strangling? I held my pajamas tightly to my body as they started to billow out, and lurched up, craning my head towards the surface. As I did so I felt something rough and scaled encircle my ankle and flit against my calf – I shrilled and bubbles crowded out of my mouth, surrounding my face, but not bursting... instead, they gathered, more and more, until I was mummified by bubbles, completely stifled by them.

* * *

They burst one at time, until I felt myself sinking onto a soft surface – I ran my fingers over a quilt, felt a pillow under my head... but I wasn't in my own bedroom, I was in one lined with plaster, the furniture strangely distorted, tilting on uneven legs or utterly malformed. I felt like I was awakening in Lewis Carrol's hands.

"Nancyyy," he chimed from nowhere. "Nancyyy."

"_Leave me alone,_" I folded the pillow around my ears.

"Nancyyy..."

"Why can't you seriously just _leave me alone?_" I demanded. "And what's with the swamp and all the showy bullshit? Can you never just cut to the-"

"Nancy, Nancy, Nancy, I don't know, can you ever go without telling a fucking lie?" he demanded, suddenly at the side of the bed, his hat obscuring his visage.

"What?"

"Felt something a little weird earlier today, thought I'd peek in on you-"

"How do you even do that? Half the time you know things, and half the time you're totally oblivious, like when I told you I was... _you know._"

"Don't be stupid, I'm not always watching you," he chuckled. "Though when you're in the shower, sometimes-"

"Okay, I get it," I snapped. "You're a disgusting pervert."

He ran a single finger along my jawline, leaning in to smell me.

"As I was saying, I felt something a little, um, _off _today, and well, when I dropped in, I was a little surprised to see that shrimpy prick sitting at your table."

I tugged my head away, "Who I have at my table is none of your goddamned busine-"

"_No, _see, that's where I think you might be _wrong._"

I felt his invisible bonds hitch me forward, before throwing me backwards at full force – my chin connected sharply with my chest and I squealed.

"He doesn't give a _flying fuck _about you or that goddamned _brat _you're carrying. He feels _guilty._"

"_Quentin cares about me, you shit!_ Whether you like it or not, there's someone out there who wants to take care of me, who wants to _protect me_."

"Or does he think I raped you, huh? Does he think that that baby got in there by force, you stupid cunt?" he barked, shaking me roughly. "He feels _bad._"

"I never said that-"

"_Yeah?_ Well that cute, little Nancy he used to know would never fuck an ugly monster like _me. _What else is he supposed to think?"

I was able to free my hand from the bonds and reached forward to nervously cradle my where you were, refusing to lock eyes with him, focusing on a line of cleavage in the ceiling from which a cobweb was flapping.

"Look at me, bitch."

"Fuck you."

"_Look at me!_" he gripped my face and cracked it towards him. "And don't close those eyes."

My breathing faltered, "_Why? _So you can insult Quentin more?"

"He doesn't love you, Sweetheart, not even a little-"

"Do _not_ call me that!"

"How about you give me a kiss then, eh? And I won't say another word," he growled against my ear.

"Get any closer and I'll bite whatever's left of your lips off."

He burst out in violent laughter, "Mmm, Little Nancy is getting fiesty."

He jumped onto the bed and mounted me, clasping my shoulders, "You know, that's always gotten me _really hard._"

I glared weakly at him, though I was almost ready to allow to him whatever sick wiles he had – I was just so tired, so ready to just give up and given in.

He was lapping at my neck, rolling the joints of my wrists between his thumb and forefinger, nuzzling my tiny Adam's apple. I stayed ductile and dollish, unresponsive to his nips and nudges, frustrating what was straining against his pants' zipper.

"Come on, Nancy-girl."

"I'm over four fucking months pregnant, why are you even doing this?"

He groaned into my neck, "You know, I thought you getting fat would be a real _turn off_... But, this really isn't _fat._"

His hands, suddenly glove-less, roamed my changing belly, exploring the way it dipped into my breast bone and rose above my crotch. You seemed aggravated by this, and booted against the wall of my uterus, harder than ever before, making the skin of my stomach jump against his palm. He tilted his head, pressing both hands on either side of my abdomen, kneading it slightly in search of another response. You moved again.

"Freddy, stop."

"Huh?"

I went rigid, "_Stop _touching me."

"Shh, Nancy-girl..."

"_Get off!_"

"Mmm, but what do you really wan-"

"For you to _stop touching me!_" My knee flew up and nailed him in the groin – his face split in instant agony.

"_You stupid bitch!_" His glove solidified back into existence, blades blinking before they were driven into the bed, just missing my throat – I leaped away precariously, your presence inside of me murdering my balance.

"_You don't wanna play nice, cunt? You wanna fuck with me?_" he screamed, fists clenched. "Well, fine, let's _fuck._"

And then... he was gone.


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter Fourteen

I woke up in a flurry, bedsheets contorted messily around me, before I threw them aside and lurched off of the bed, sick with fear, only to find Quentin entirely unharmed, drowsing on his stomach with a patch of drool by his face on the spare pillow. I knelt down beside him and jiggled him back into the waking world.

"Quentin? Quentin, wake up!" I begged.

"Huh- Ugh, Nancy, cut it out, I'm up, I'm up!"

Without thinking, I held his face in my palms and pushed my thumbs against his cheekbones, locking his eyes with mine.

"Quentin, did you dream?"

"Jesus, Nancy..." He detached his face from my hands, staring, sleep still clearing from his overcast eyes.

"_Quentin,_ did you dream?" I demanded.

"No, no- not about him, anyways," he stuttered, starting to understand what I was saying. "I don't remember dreaming at all."

I sat back on my heels, "Oh, thank god... thank god, thank god, thank god..."

My hands instinctively went to my stomach, running over the swell as if I was comforting you through my stroking, and Quentin glanced away immediately, uncomfortable.

"So, um, did you dream?" he asked uneasily.

I thought of the stink of the swamp, the feeling of him on top of me, his wanting to "play."

"Yes..."

"Nanc-"

"He's angry- he's _furious._ He called me a c-cunt, said he wanted to _play._"

"What do you think that means?" he inquired shakily.

"He doesn't just say things... he's going to do something horrible, Quentin... it could be to any of us, all we have to do is sleep and he has us."

"What do you mean any of us?"

"Anyone I remotely care about could be at risk... even if I hardly know them, he knows what guilt can do to me."

Quentin rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes, "Who would you feel absolutely horrible about losing, then? Whose death would kill you with guilt?"

"Yours... my mother's... hell, even the people I work with."

"What about that girl?"

"I don't even know her name, Quentin... and I already told you, she's probably dead already," I sighed.

He propped himself up on his elbows and watched me intently, "Can I ask you something?"

"Shoot."

"How did... _this _happen?" he gestured to my stomach.

"Why?"

"Because how this- this _baby _happened could change how we handle this."

"You don't even want to call it a baby," I whispered, dejected.

"That's not true-"

"_Yes it is!_ My baby's not a freak, Quentin, it's not a monster!"

"I seriously didn't mean anything by that! I'm sorry... Please, just answer me."

"I had a dream... that I was in this little house in some typical suburbia... and then he was there and, I don't know, I just- we just fucked."

"You let him-"

"He didn't rape me, Quentin... and I didn't just lay there and take it."

"You went along with it," he sounded almost as if he was in a type of disgusted awe.

"I don't know why... I guess I was just lonely."

"That's not even _like_ you, Nancy. You're not the type of girl who fucks anyone just so you don't feel fat-"

"Things have changed since you last saw me," I said flatly.

He ground his teeth, "Fine, whatever, I just wanted to know how it happened."

"That wasn't it."

"But you said-"

"That's just how it started..."

"It happened more than once?"

"It happened all the time," I muttered, just as you started to rise and kick, stirred by the voices your fetal ears had begun to hear.

"Did he ever hurt you?"

"Yes..."

"_How?_"

"He'd cut me sometimes, but I think that's just because it..." I paused, embarrassed. "It got him off. He's shoved me before, when he got

frustrated, and the night I tried to save that girl he punched me..."

"But he never tried to kill you?"

"No."

"Does he ever reference... your baby?" Quentin flinched when he said it – I would later learn it was because he so wanted you, the child I carried, to be his.

"Yes."

He took in a quaky breath, "This could've been us, Nancy, every day..."

"Quentin..."

"The baby could've been _ours._"

"Don't think that I don't think about that every day... How I drove you away..."

"But I'm back now," he sat up, hand reaching out, unsure, to rest on my stomach. "We can fix this."

"No, we can't... Quentin, it's just too late."


	15. Chapter 15

**Author's Note: While I have a general idea where the story's going, I'm curious to know what you lovely readers want. If you have a type of scene that you're dying to see in the story, please message me your suggestion, or leave a suggestion in your review. While I can't guarantee that I'll use it, there's a chance I might feature a few of your "prompts" throughout.**

* * *

Chapter Fifteen

Nothing much else occurred that day – I arrived at work late, as was per usual, and received disgruntled glares from Hillary and a new boy that was working behind the counter, no older than the age of seventeen, whose name I couldn't seem to remember, no matter how many times he repeated it for me. I baked and frosted three batches of cupcakes, piped cream into cannolis, and botched two attempts at making a mint hot chocolate for a customer, who in turn laid down two dollars and said they'd have anything, _just hurry up already._ I swept stray hairs and baker's sweat off of my forehead, holding back from reminding them that hassling a pregnant woman who had just struck five months _**and **_who had just spilled mint cream and cocoa powder down her apron would be rewarded with eternity in the seventh circle of hell. Instead, I gave them a mug of coffee and a bear claw on the house, to which they sniffed and made some comment about a bakery some blocks down the street. Yet, it wasn't until the third mishap with the blender that I gave in, letting the tin of cocoa clatter on the tiles, a draft of chocolate powder buoying up around my ankles, and ran into the kitchen for a long, hard sob.

"Nancy?" I heard Hillary demand as I huddled on a stool, crying. "What are you doing? We have customers waiting!"

I dabbed away tears with the edge of my apron and cried childishly, "I don't care! They're all yelling at me!"

"What the hell is going on- Nancy, are you _crying?_"

"What does it look like? Of course I'm crying! I can't deal with any of this anymore – these people, this baby, and its- its goddamned father!"

"Nancy, calm down... What happened?"

"I can't work the fucking blender! I don't know why, but I just can't! What kind of mother am I going to be if I can't even make mint cocoa?"

"I think most women don't know how to make mint cocoa," she humored. "Is that what this is all about?"

"No..."

"Is it the father? He a real asshole?"

"You have no idea..."

She nodded, crossing her ankles, "Thought so. Listen, Nancy, you're a nice kid, I can tell, but if you keep coming in late and letting your personal life get in the way... I don't know if I can convince the big guy upstairs to keep you on."

"I know..."

"And if you get fired, well, I don't know how easy it would be for you to get another job when you're- how pregnant are you?"

"Five months today," I grumbled.

"I'm just saying, I understand what you're going through is hard, but, please, for your baby's sake, try and keep this job."

"Okay... Thanks," I said halfheartedly.

"One more thing."

"Huh?"

"Have you gotten a crib yet?"

I stared blankly at her, as if it had never occurred to me that you were ever going to actually come out, "No..."

"A changing table?"

"No."

"Anything?"

"No... not really."

"Nancy, do you really think you're going to keep this baby?"

* * *

Quentin came by to walk me home from work, holding two plastic grocery bags and combing his hair out of his eyes.

"Hey."

"Hey... What are you doing here?"

"Nancy, I was thinking - and if this is a bad idea - feel free to tell me, but maybe I should stay at your house for a little while? Just until I know that we're both safe?"

I toed a break in the sidewalk, "Quentin, that's really sweet... but I don't know if it's such a good idea."

"Please, I promise it'll be fine. My roommate can take care of my place while I'm gone, and I'll stay, I don't know, three days _tops_."

"We're not going to have this figured out in three days."

"Says who?"

* * *

When we got back to the apartment I set a pot of noodles to boil and watched him rustling through the bags.

"What'd you buy?"

"Just a little... something."

"What kind of little something," I eased into a kitchen chair, my changing shape beginning to make it harder and harder to sit comfortably.

He unfolded something small and powder-pink, made of a towel-like fabric, with a pig face stitched onto the right breast.

"You got... you got a _onesie?_" I laughed.

"Why is that funny, is your baby going to be naked all the time?"

I kept laughing, "No, I guess not. But who says it's a girl?"

"I don't know, maybe the same person who says pink has to be for a girl?"

"Quentin, the pig has hearts for eyes!"

"Maybe your son just really loves pigs!"

I shook my head, my hair falling free of its scrunchy, "Okay, well, thank you. Any other little gems in those bags?"

A grin cleaved his face in two, "Why, Miss Holbrook, I thought you'd never ask!"

He laid out two more onesies (purple and orange, both of which he asserted were masculine), a rubber bath elephant, two bibs, turtle-shaped baby bowls, and a fluted sun hat.

"Quentin, the day I put this hat on a boy is the day I request you shoot me in the face," I joked, fascinated by how the butt-flap on the orange onesie snapped and unsnapped.

"So, just because he's a boy, you're going to let his head boil?"

"Of course."

I felt you kick, annoyed by the way in which my laughter bounced you about.

"Quentin, I really do appreciate it, though... thank you."

He offered a goofy smiled, "No problem."

* * *

We watched Saturday Night Live reruns and spilled spaghetti sauce on the couch and felt, I think, as though the gap that was our time apart was being cleanly sutured closed. As I smiled at him, my feet propped on his knees, the television's glow catching on his curly hair, I felt like it almost didn't matter that you weren't his, like we could lie and make it all so much easier... And when our eyes connected and he held my head to kiss me, the last thing I was thinking was that, in a few months time, I would never see him again.


	16. Chapter 16

Chapter Sixteen

We fell asleep in our clothes, with our bodies tightly knitted together on the couch and Quentin's head burrowed in the crook of my neck; we forgot the TV on, and, for a few moments, the jabber of a late night talk show glimmered in my dreams, before everything turned red... but it wasn't the typical shade of the boiler room, an orangish alloy, it was a deep and gory red, darker than a split jugular, and the steam wasn't water vapor – it burned my eyes and had a horrid, sulfuric stench. The floor scalded my bare hands, blazing orange from a sourceless heat.

"_Nancy!_" I heard Freddy's voice echo from the scaffolding, but it wasn't mocking or horny like usual, it was enraged and storming. "_Where are you, you stupid bitch?_"

I got to my feet, holding my stomach, and ran down a set of dredgy scissor stairs, but no matter how fast I ran or for how long, the stairs continued to extend – I was as close to the bottom as I had been ten seconds before. I braced the railing and the metal instantly became slick in my grip, turning into a slimy, slippery tar, causing me to lose my footing and tumble backwards, landing hard on my butt.

"_What do you want?_" I cried. "_What the fuck do you want?_"

Suddenly, I was at the bottom of the stairwell and his shadow was slowly unfolding over me. I looked up to see that his fedora was covering his horribly deformed face, his blades rubbing ceaselessly against each other and chest heaving raggedly.

"Freddy..?"

When his head tipped upright I noticed right away that his blue eyes looked shinier than usual, but not in a cheerful or excited way, and they were droopier, squinted at me in rage. I tried to push myself backwards, but the stairs had been replaced by a crumbling, brick wall, and I could do nothing but stand myself up with it.

"Freddy, what's going on-"

His ring finger's blade shot up, pointing straight at me, "_You tell me, bitch._"

I stiffened – he'd insulted me in the past, especially the previous night, but this was different... this reminded me of what he was truly capable of, "Freddy... Please, calm down-"

He violently grabbed hold my shoulders, bruising them with force, "_Do not fucking tell me to calm down!_"

He hurled me back and my head slammed into the wall – I heard my spine crackle unnaturally.

"_Don't fucking tell me anything!_"

I ducked down, but his blades still skimmed my cheek, reaping blood in a moon-shape from my temple, down my cheek.

"If this is about Quentin-"

"_What are you gonna say, huh?_" he screamed. "_That you're not fucking the little shit? That you're not all tangled up with him on your couch right now?_"

"I haven't had sex with him!"

"Maybe not yet," he growled. "But you know what they say sucking face can lead to."

He picked me back up and banged me harder against the wall; I lifted my foot and tried helplessly to kick him in the calf.

"_You said that you wouldn't even give a shit if I fucked someone else!_" I spat, wrestling to get away from him, only to be clutched harder.

He planted his face in front of mine, "I saw that fucking cutesy baby shit he bought you. I heard you saying that you _wished that that brat you're carrying was his._"

His blades were digging relentlessly into my wrist, and I felt a horrible snagging and stinging, the blood spilling out rapidly; I shrieked frantically.

"_Freddy, please, stop!_"

"_No._" He scowled at me, "_You _stop."

"_Stop, what?_"

Releasing me, he stepped back rigidly and surveyed me, "Get on your knees."

"_Fuck you!_ You wonder why I let Quentin back in my life? It's because he doesn't _abuse me! _Because I know he could love me _and this baby_, and it's not even his!"

Glaring at me, he said nothing.

"Leave Quentin out of this, Freddy! He can't help the fact he's a genuinely _good_ person-"

"He can help where his fucking _hands _go."

"He hasn't groped me, you pervert!"

His stare remained fixed.

"You're talking about when he touched my stomach? Are you _kidding me?_"

"It's not his brat-"

"I don't care! It's not your body!"

He took a step closer as I sank against the wall, "_It's not his fucking kid!_"

"You treat me like shit, and then get insanely possessive! _What the fuck is wrong with you?_"

I saw his hand beginning to rear up, ready to stab at me again, and I made a strange and rapid decision – I took hold of his left hand and, without warning, pushed it against my stomach. I prayed that you, who had been still the entire time, would move, even a little bit, to curb his anger, or to at least distract him, the monster looming over me. You answered my prayer some inches lower, towards the base of my stomach, and I hesitantly slid his hand down, hiccuping on my breaths, the acrid steam twirling around us.

Taking a step closer, I rested my head on his chest, "Quentin hasn't felt that."

I felt him rest his face on my scalp and sigh, a gesture that I had learned was meant to be affectionate, and we both remained still, sentries in the dark.

"He hasn't felt it move, our baby..." I took comfort, somehow, in the scratchiness of his ugly sweater and his hollow breathing.

"But I can tell you," he murmured, some time after. "What he _is_ going to feel."

I pulled my head back, "Wha-"

And then, like so many times before, I was left standing alone and shivering.


	17. Chapter 17

Chapter Seventeen

I woke up to the morning light mellowing on our bodies (still intimately braided together), with the blanket in a rumpled pile on the floor and my alarm clock beeping down the hall. I reached up and touched Quentin's hair, half expecting to feel warm, sticky blood matting it, but my hand came back dry – kissing the top of his cheekbone and I uncoiled myself and headed for the kitchen. I rummaged through one of my top cabinets and pulled out a small waffle iron, plugging it in and turning the knob.

"Quentin? Hey, Quentin, do you want waffles?"

I took his sleeping silence as a "yes," and pulled out a cardboard box of malted waffle mix, dumping it in a mixing bowel. I rested my hand on my stomach and stared at the powdery mix, realizing that I didn't even have milk, seeing as my faulty fridge hardly kept it longer than three days. I stepped on the trash can's pedal and dumped the contents into the trash bag.

"Scratch the waffles, we're having cereal!"

"Wha?" He called groggily from the den.  
"We're having cereal for breakfast!"  
"Oh, um, okay..." I heard him drifting back to sleep.

My pregnancy had heightened my sense of smell to a grotesque degree, and when I opened the box of Cheerios I found myself keeling over the sink, almost spitting up some bile and remembering how I'd _never_ liked the smell of Cheerios in the first place. I steadied myself on the basin and breathed out slowly, emptying my lungs of the bad air just as I heard Quentin scream out from the couch.

"_Quentin?_"

I flew down the hall and found him, sprawled out on the floor, with the blanket corkscrewed under him and something reddish on his splayed out hands. I knelt down to his side as hastily as I could, gently jostling him.

"Quentin? _Quentin?_"

He twitched and I helped to roll him onto his back, only to see the wreckage that was his face and chest, completely battered and contused – his shirt had been torn to ribbons, and blood was flowering from four gashes, steeping through the split fabric; his right eye was beginning to swell shut and his nose was broken, making it list to the right, blood crusting under his nostrils and busted lip and split brow.

"_Oh my god_," I hoisted myself up and practically sprinted to the kitchen, feeling the familiar sting of tears behind my eyeballs.

I filled a pot with hot, sudsy water, gathered up five or six hand towels, and a first aid kit, trying to decide if first aid training in home economics class meant I was able to properly stitch up a wound. Quentin groaned louder, making a gurgling noise when the blood dribbled into his throat. I stumbled back to him, cutting away the shirt around the wounds and, for a brief second, remembering that I had once had shallower cousin scars on my hips and sides, only they had been acquired in a very different manner. Forgetting this, I soaked one of the towels and, as gently as possible, dabbed away the blood and washed the slashes, before cleaning off his face until no red flecks remained and tipping his head to the side, coaxing him to spit out the blood from his lips. Squirting disinfectant into all of his wounds, save for his cracked mouth, I saw a little more blood beading around his chest's lacerations and felt the jut of his broken nasal bone – I could dab and wash as much as I liked, but, repairable as the damage was, I didn't have the stomach to crack his nose back into place, or stitch between his nipples...

* * *

The lights of the waiting room were grainy and flickered on off beats, as I sat in a pleather chair and stared at the broken forms around me, sick with worry for the boy who'd not even a day before had bought me girly onesies. An elderly man complained of chest constrictions, a girl with a bandaged forehead kept poking her dressings and whining, and a young mother with enormous fake nails and the stench of cigarettes impatiently jiggled her infant as he screamed, following the age old rule of trailer trash: if your baby cries, just shake more. I tried as hard as I could to ignore it, but from the corner of my eye I watched him, barely old enough to sit up, as his head flipped loosely back and forth and his face reddened with each wail. I felt you kicking idly, probably worn out from the stress I'd endured, and looked back, feeling a mounting disgust for the way that she shook the infant.

"_Shut up,_" she hissed in his ear. "_Shut up!_"

The other people waiting in the room shifted their gazes awkwardly to expired magazines, or the started pulling the stuffing from the armrests of their seats, but I couldn't take it anymore... I couldn't stop worrying about his soft brain bouncing against his skull like a pickle being shaken in a jar.

"Excuse me, ma'am, but have you never heard of Shaken Baby Syndrome?" I snapped.

"Excuse me, _ma'am_, but ain't you ever heard of mindin' your own business?"

"Do you _want_ to cause brain damage, or are you just aiming to kill him so he'll stop crying?"

He started relaxing in her grip, her mission to shake him senseless forgotten.

"You mind your own goddamned business, you hear me? I-"

"Miss Neils?" a nurse with a hairstyle making her resemble a lollipop called out from one of the ever opening and closing doors. "Miss Neils?"

The woman huffed and jolted her baby up as she rose, causing a new rash of cries.

As I watched her leave, I smoothed my hand across my stomach, which felt heavier and tauter by the day, and wondered if I could ever shake you like that, if I could whisper hateful words of _shutupshutupshutup!_ I prayed that I couldn't, I felt your little kicks still as you sank into the depths of my womb and just prayed that I couldn't.

* * *

"Nancy, Nancy, Nancy."

I sat up, the all too familiar boiler steam curling in feline shapes around my seated body, a high-pitched whistling coming from a fractured pipe and water spouting from broken lines. Too exhausted and worried to respond, I just sat and watched him unfold down the stairs, a wiry shape that I was growing weary of. I let the water splash on me when it hit the metal floor.

"How's the boyfriend, eh?"

I stared.

"To tell you the truth, I was gonna rough that little fucker up a whole lot more, before you opened your trap and pulled him out of here-"

"Leave him-"

"-Alone. Yeah, yeah, I know. I've heard that somewhere before-"

"I'm sleeping in the waiting room," I stated more than asked, horrified that a nurse with a cork clipboard was going to call my name to see Quentin... and I wouldn't answer.

"Don't interrupt me-"

"Shut up," I replied absentmindedly.

He chuckled roughly, "Now, what was that? I don't think I heard Little Nancy right, because I know she has better manners than that-"

"_Shut up._"

"Again," he demanded.

"_Shut the fuck up!_" I screamed, standing shakily to my feet, before propelling forward and punching his chest. "_Shut your goddamned mouth, you sick, perverted monster! Quentin needs me!_"

His chest rumbled when he laughed, before he pushed me back and I fell against a piped wall, making the metal clang.

"You're getting pretty damn _frisky_ again, aren't you, kid? Really fucking _feisty._"

"I didn't mean-"

"Oh, don't bullshit me, _yes you did._ You meant every fucking word of it, didn't you, you little cunt?" he was pushed against me, sighing against my cheek. "And, you know what else I know that you're not telling me? You like it when I talk to you like this, don't you, bitch? Quentin might lay rose petals on the bed and _make love_ to you, but he'll never be able to _fuck _you dirty like I can."

I stayed frigid, as he switched places with me, sliding down the wall and bringing me with him, drawing me onto his lap.

"And I'll tell you what," he bit my neck. "When you call me a monster, that's what I fucking _need._"

And I felt that need straining his pants, rubbing against my jean-covered crotch.

"Admit it," he ordered, slapping my ass. "_Admit it, cunt._"

I stayed silent, even when he latched onto my neck and sucked it violently, leaving a hickey that was probably already blooming in the waking world. It wasn't until he unbuttoned my pants and shoved his hand in with no warning, pushing two fingers inside of me as he bit for blood, that I yelped and, instead of fighting, bore into his shoulders with my nails that needed trimming. I tried to tell myself I'd get back to Quentin faster if I just went along with it... and as much as I want to believe that, I know that's not why I did it.

"_Freddy._"

"_Mmm?_"

"Just- just look at me."

For probably the first time he obeyed me and looked up, before I secured my mouth on top of his and rang his hipbones between my fingers, holding on...

"You like it," he muttered.

"_I don't know,_" I answered honestly, still rocking my pelvis against his hand.

"Hmm, call me a monster again, bitch."

"_You're a monster,_" I felt a bit wrong and rather silly saying that, but his fingers were making friction against my clit, and I was assuring myself that it was okay to like it... that Quentin would be fine...

He extracted his hand and connected our mouths again, sucking my lips, tracing my tongue with his as he ran his hands under my shirt, up the naked planes of my back.

"Sexy, sexy Little Nancy," he murmured. "Always listens to her cunt."

"_Monster._"

He grunted and thrust his crotch against mine, "_Nancy._"


	18. Chapter 18

**Author's Note: Warning, this chapter is entirely sexual.**

* * *

Chapter Eighteen

I let him take me to his bed, the one with the sour smelling mattress and crooked bed frame, springs peeking out here and there under the orange glow. He ground his clothed erection against my thigh, groaning at the contact and continuously smashing his mouth onto mine, sucking and kissing and licking my mouth frantically in a way that I didn't recognize – usually when we fucked he'd spend more time burying his face into my shoulder or chewing on my neck, but not that time... That time he wouldn't stop kissing me, pushing his ugly, warped mouth against my cheeks and jaw and lips, jerking me to swap places with him, so that he could sit against the headboard and I could straddle him – he always made sure that he was smothering me, or level with me; I was never on top. His left hand had weaseled its way into the back of my pants, grasping my ass, while the other did away with my shirt, slit my bra, made angry, red squiggles down my spine. I was growing increasingly uncomfortable with his unceasing kissing, the taste of his burnt maw against mine; I wrapped my arms around his neck and forced him into my nude chest, but he only sucked on one nipple briefly, before ascending back to my face. He shifted, almost unsure of what to do about my stomach, before husking himself of his shirt and squeezing me as close as your presence would allow, my nipples tweaking against his ridged skin.

Somewhere in the haze our pants and shoes disappeared, though I was left with a sock on my right foot, hanging limply off of my ankle. He didn't seem desperate to sheath himself inside of me like usual, instead he seemed satisfied with us biting each other and writhing, our skin creating a sticky heat on every curve and crevice of the other's body. When he finally chose to enter me, it was in an uncomfortably apathetic way, slow and hardly impassioned, as if whether or not he felt my slickness barely mattered; he kept holding the fleshiness of my thighs, an uninvited guest that arrived with my pregnancy, and biting my chin. I tried to lean back and yelped, feeling the first twinges of pregnancy induced-backache finger my spine; his hand straightened me, wedging me against his chest, the other slithering between our compressed shapes and flexing against my breast, like it was testing it, before gripping down hard. Our bodies moved fluidly, like cursive.

"Thought this was supposed to hurt," he grunted, kneading my chest roughly.

I shook my head, hair glued to my face, "They haven't really changed."

I felt embarrassed for my breasts' lack of growth, a blessing of pregnancy which had seemingly overstepped me, but he just grunted and buried his face in them regardless. I rocked against him for a while, feeling strangely at ease with the type of pleasure that, before, only Quentin had given me – it was gentle and steady, with the occasional spastic thrust, with enough kisses to measure the Empire State Building... that was until he pulled the hair out of my face and squashed his charred fedora on my head, pushing his face against mine.

"Ride 'em, cowgirl," he half-moaned, half-chuckled, sliding down on his back for the first time in our history of fucking.

"I can't," I gasped deliriously. "This isn't a cowgirl hat!"

His rusty laugh echoed as he straightened me, "Close enough, kid, close enough."

I planted my hands unsteadily on either side of him and started to rock quickly, almost violently, making him thrust upwards.

"How awful do I look from this angle?" I joked, in part really wondering how fat my body did appear to him.

His sharp, blue eyes scanned me, "Hot enough for me."

I moaned against his thrusts, leaning lower, "Any- anything is hot enough for _you._"

He just laughed, probably because it was true, and reached up, running his hands up the front of my belly, feeling the weird way that my navel had gone flat, no longer an indentation. He clawed lightly at the tightened skin, moving his right hand in a strange, circular motion over the places where you kicked.

"Just ignore it," I gasped, humping faster. "Just ignore it, the baby does that all the time."

But his hands didn't move, even when I leaned back, ignoring the twinges in my back and supporting myself by putting my hands behind me, head tilted up towards the moldering ceiling. His hands stayed where they were, fingers spread wide across my stomach, cradling you through a barrier of flesh and uterus – I felt you squirm against his hands and then still. With a lullaby of animal sounds and fevered thrusts, it was one of the only times that your father would ever rock you to sleep.


	19. Chapter 19

Chapter Nineteen

"Look at this," Quentin said quietly, groggy from the painkillers they'd fed into his IV, pointing at the stitches running at an angle down his chest – they looked like railroad tracks. "What should the story behind behind these bad boys be?"

I forced a smile, having been woken up recently in the otherwise empty emergency room, an foul stickiness between my legs, "You got in a knife fight."

"That's it?"

"On top of a burning building," I added. "You ended up saving hundreds of Brazilian orphans."

He laughed, "From the fire, or the person I was fighting?"

I leaned back in the visitor's chair, staring at the bandages casting his newly reset nose, "Both."

After a moment, "Nancy?"

"Hmm?" My hands skiied down my stomach, a strange habit they'd developed on their own.

"What are we gonna do?"

You'd been still since my encounter with your father – whether you were asleep or lulled, I wasn't sure.

"Quentin, I just... I don't know..."

His eyes were creamy from either shock or the drugs, but he still managed to turn his head and focus on me, "I can't keep doing this, Nancy."

He sounded weak and tired, the way I thought, maybe, I should have been feeling. I couldn't look straight at him, a terrible guilt budding in my gut because of what I'd done, letting a monster take me to bed... I just shook my head.

"Please don't talk like that."

"What am I supposed to talk like?" he snapped. "Like this isn't a fucking _hopeless_ situation? What are we supposed to do, just never sleep until he decides to vanish for another two, three years?"

"What are you talking about, just- just _giving up?_"

"He can't get to us if we're- if we don't sleep anymore."

"Quentin, what are you talking about?" I demanded.

"I don't think he can reach us if we're dead," he said softly.

I didn't anwser, lips parted stupidly, staring at him with doeish eyes.

"A baby can't live without... without the um, the mother-"

"I know that," he whispered, sounding strangely ashamed.

I plastered my hand to my abdomen, "No."

"Nancy-"

"_No._"

"_What else is there left to do? I'd rather die by my own hands than his!_"

I shook my head, ironing my shirt down with sweaty palms and furling my toes, "_I don't know!_"

"_Do you know what he did?_ He didn't fucking play with me; he didn't screw around. He punched me in the face the _minute_ I fell back asleep! He just punched me in the face and _went to kill._"

"I don't under-"

"This isn't a game to him anymore, Nancy. He wants me out of the way."

* * *

I will never understand why he went back home with me that day; he whispered, as we sat on my bed in the waning light, that it was because he loved me... but love just didn't seem like enough of a reason to me, perhaps because I no longer truly believed in the distilled, confectionary idea of it; perhaps it's because when I thought love I thought of hair-pulling and "cunt" and the sound of naked, slapping flesh... I don't know... But come back with me he did, and though our fingers kept making circles around each other's knuckles and our lips grazed briefly time to time, we never went where I wish we had. There was an unspoken knowledge between us that bedding the other would only make it all so much worse...

When night finally veiled my apartment, Quentin popped three gel pills and propped himself upright in the chair across from my bed. I laid on my side and prayed that the world would dissolve not into the glow of the boiler room, and not only into a dreamless sleep, but a perenial one, a neverending goodnight.

Instead, the air went orange.


	20. Chapter 20

Chapter Twenty

It was almost like he didn't know I was there when I arrived... I found myself alone in a steam-clotted corner of the boiler room, my skin flaring against the heat and eyes clouding up. I moved out of the way of the slivered pipes and cautiously eased around a corner, feeling uneasy about his absence, waiting for him to spring from the ceiling or plaster my face against the nearest gridded wall. The steam was sweeping up in circular pinwheels, rather than wispy tails, and I was about to reach out and touch one when I heard it. Over the perpetual hissing, I heard the first whimpers, the fledgling victim-sounds that would soon grow to shrieks and wails, as Freddy's knives stopped ghosting and started plunging.

"_Please, please, what do you want?_" I heard the boy begging.

Freddy laughed gravelly, and, underneath it, I could hear a huskiness that sounded far too much like the noise he made when he was straddling me.

I heard the stumbling of what I knew would be a pointless getaway attempt, the shuffling as the boy slid around corners and down stairs, frantically searching for an exit chute or portal that would take him back to safety, back to the two-dimensional dreamworld tucked beneath his eyelids. I was too tired to feel pity or fear... too worn. I heard footsteps approaching placidly from behind, far calmer than the frenzied ones overhead, before two arms slung around my waist and a tilted head nuzzled against the side of my throat. I jerked away when his hands crept to my abdomen, blades snagging on my shirt, and, without much hesitation, punched him square in his mangled jaw. It wouldn't hurt him, I knew that, but my nerve and the crunch of my fist on his hideous face, would grate on him like nothing else – I wasn't surprised when he socked me back, popping my shoulder out of place.

"You know, I'm not really in the mood for feisty-Nancy, not tonig-"

"_Fuck you! You're ruining everything!_"

He laughed, before grunting and stepping back, surveying me in a grossly amused way.

"_Help!_" I heard echo from above. "_Oh god, will someone, please..._"

"Who's this boy, huh?" I shouted. "What in god's name did he do to you? Is he eying another one of your _stupid bitches?_"

He chuckled throatily, loping closer to me, cupping my face and tightening his hold when I flinched. His thumb rode my cheekbone and his lips brushed my hairline, more in a mocking way than anything else.

"You slay me, kid, you really do."

I stared intently at the floor, refusing to respond, even when he roughly popped my shoulder back in place.

"If I found some other bitch quite like you, do you think I'd keep bringing you around?" he chewed my ear and I swatted him, only to have my wrists gripped. "Well, _do you?_ Huh, Little Nancy? Think I'd still be fucking you if I'd found a pussy that's, uh..." he put his hand on my stomach. "A little _easier to reach_?"

That was when my eyes finally flickered up and locked with his, their too-blue irises swimming in foul, brackish whites.

"You know what I think?" I yelled, snapping my hands away. "I think you would! I think you'd hang that 'pussy' out to dry, and then you'd keep pulling me away from the people that need me, so you can get your _disgusting, burned up rocks __off!_"

"_Pulling you away?_" he howled. "Fuck, bitch, you crawled! You were practically screaming my name by the end."

He said the last part in a lower voice, gnawing on my shoulder and taking my hand in his bladed one, forcing me to cup his hardening crotch through his pants.

"Stop-"

"Or what?"

"_What is wrong with you?_" I jerked away, squinting at him in repulsion. "I'm having your _fucking baby._"

This seemed to truly tickle him, because he threw his head back and smiled his yellowed, agee smile, "I don't want some shriveled, little baby, bitch! What the fuck would I do with that?"

I stared dumbly, for, I suppose, I'd fooled myself yet again – I thought, by the way he held me, the way he seemed fascinated by your kicks and rousing, that, perhaps, I was carrying and nourishing something that mattered to him...

"What, you think I was gonna soften up? Think I was gonna build you a crib and walk the kid to preschool and be a good _daddy?_"

"You... get jealous when Quentin buys me baby clothes... and yet, you really _don't _care..."

"I don't like him fucking trying to steal your stupid, little heart with that shit. It has nothing to do with that-"

"It has to do with me..."

"It's always been about you. You're my _number one-_"

When he said that, I saw a brief flash of me as a child, smearing stick figures on the walls in paint, a yet-to-be-charred Freddy touching me from behind-

"Do _not _say that. _Ever._"

He snorted, "Number one, number one, _number one._"

It was then that the boy rounded the corner, confusing our voices for kindred spirits and drawing towards us – Freddy didn't even look at him, his arm just shot out and, within a second, his blades perforated the faceless boy's chest, the body going slack instantly on his hand. I wanted to vomit, the blood spurting out when Freddy extracted his hand and wiped it along his pants.

"Where were we?"

"You're... you're not even a monster. I don't know _what _the fuck you are," I leered, stepping back. "I'm glad you don't give a shit about this goddamned baby, because it's _gone _the minute it comes out."

"You gonna kill it, Nancy?" he laughed.

Then it hit me, what I had to do...

"Yes."


	21. Chapter 21

**Author's Note: Thank you all for the lovely reviews! This one's a really short chapter, but I am tired, and wanted to break this off from the next chapter, anyway, for the sake of flow. Again, thank you!**

* * *

Chapter Twenty-One

He didn't answer me at first, just observed me with an emotionless gaze before turning his back to me and heading up a set of scissor stairs.

He paused halfway up, "Come on."

I took a quaky breath and made my way after him, tagging behind him to the room with the sour-smelling mattress.

"Sit down," he ordered under his breath.

I didn't say a word, sinking uneasily onto the bed, unable to lock our eyes due to the obscuring of his hat's brim.

"Freddy..."

"No fucking coat hangers," he muttered, pacing rigidly.

"Wait, what?"

"No one's gonna be able to legally shove a hose up you at this point, sweetheart," he snapped. "And I'm not letting some coat hanger get shoved up where I belong..."

I took a quaky breath, "No... um, wait, I meant... I meant I'd do it after-"

"And we both know that's a load of shit."

"I-"

"You don't have it in you, kid. Hate to break it to you."

I tried to sit up, but the invisible tentacles of his world looped around me and forced me to down, flat on my back.

"You don't know that! I'll do it after!" I spat.

"Please, I've seen that dumb-bitch look you get in your eyes when you think about the goddamned brat! I've seen that wishy-washy look you get when we fuck, _like you're pretending I'm some fucking hotshot lawyer with a mansion and wedding ring!_" he was shouting at that point, burying his fist repeatedly into the gridded wall.

"You were playing tough, thinking you're gonna to show me. Well guess what? _I'm the grown up and you're the stupid-_" he jammed a blade into the mattress, by my head.

"_-little-_" now by my chest.

"_-girl!_" it burrowed beside my stomach, and he was on top of me, left hand squeezing my right shoulder until it turned fifty different hues of purple.

"And I'm really getting tired of having to _spoil you._"

And then, finally, I'd had enough – I don't know how or why, but I unhitched my arm from the invisible restraints and, without thinking, cracked him straight in the eye socket.

"_Spoiling me?_" I screamed. "You call carving up my friend, haunting me, and beating me _spoiling me?_"

He tilted his head at me, forcing my arm back down.

"You forget you could be _dead, bitch. _You forget that I could fucking gut you and put a knife through this stupid, little rugrat's squishy, little _head._ I've given you way more than I've given _anyone_, because I knew... I _knew_ that you'd let me touch you like you'd let me all those years ago," he breathed hotly.

"_Well I wish you hadn't! I wish you'd fucking hung me up like all the others!_"

His jaw set itself on edge, tight and stone-like.

"_What?_"

"I wished you had killed me! This baby doesn't deserve the horrible things you'd put it through, and neither do I! _So do it! Cut it out, and let me go with it!_"

The blue of his eyes seemed to malculate into a sickish gray.

"And one more thing," I spat. "You're right, I was just playing tough. I'd _never_ kill my child, I'm not a monster, not like _you._"


	22. Chapter 22

Chapter Twenty-Two

His grip eased and he dismounted the bed, not even striking me across the face or splitting the skin along my collarbone, just turning to dissolve into the gloom and leave me alone, ransacked and helpless, battered and dumb. You moved slightly, almost as if testing the waters to be sure that another kick wouldn't bring back the stormy waterspout that had just passed through, turning your otherwise warm world on its head, sloshing placenta about. Part of me knew that, when I'd said I'd do it, I had almost meant it. I had almost mean that, upon your birth, I would kill you, by smothering you, or shaking you, or, maybe, by putting rat poison in a bottle of my breast milk. I squeezed my eyes shut to wring them dry of brackish tears and defog my wavering vision, that was until I realized that the bedroom was actually becoming distorted and it wasn't just my perception. The bed frame was warping, collapsing in on itself until it literally vanished under the mattress; the walls were turning into black sludge, oozing to the floor that too had begun to bubble and spit.

I knew that tarry gunk, which greedily sucked at the edge of the mattress, for it had once swallowed me some years ago, before the ceiling burst and I found myself dressed in frills and dollish buttons, before I felt Freddy's erection against my thigh and he told me that we were going to be there for a long time. In reality, it was only minutes before Quentin drove an adrenaline shot between my breasts and I lurched out of a near coma, but still, he was right... My time awake was a joke, mostly made of meaningless spaces between sleep and our time together; had I really ever left his nightmare world that night nearly three years ago? Or was he just letting me have gasps of air between each session of asphyxiation? Had I ever really escaped Fred Krueger, or did he just like allowing me to think that I had, all for the sake of his fucked up game?

I didn't know... I almost didn't care. Nothing mattered as the sludge overtook me and I awoke.

* * *

You reached six months of existence that day, a human being inside of me, only a little over a foot long, who was just beginning to remember my voice, and differentiate light from darkness, and grow eyelashes... You were rolling and shifting more than kicking or punching, slowly running out of room in the safest place you would ever live. Quentin was endlessly amused by you, but I flinched every time he went to touch my stomach, recoiling at the memory of Freddy's explosive fury over this, at the way he'd tried to cut Quentin into fleshy spirals for forgetting that it wasn't his "brat." What did he care? Sometimes I'd stare at myself after a long, humid shower as the steam receded to the edge of the mirror, wondering not only why Freddy cared, but why anyone cared. What did it matter? You might be born a normal, flawless human, but, one day, your heart, too, would still and your kidneys would fail and your blood would grow stagnant... One day we'd all die, you and Quentin and I, the people who frequented my bakery and my neighbors down the hall – everyone... When we were all dead and gone, I wondered, what would my sacrifices mean?

I spent a lot of time alone during the end of my pregnancy, feeling more and more like I was pregnant with a headstone rather than a child, like I myself was already a washed out corpse slugging towards the grave. Freddy hadn't visited me since the night he faded away – I pretended that he was pouting and wallowing, when I really knew that he was just pissed and probably reaping innocent blood because of it. And, when I'd lie on the couch and you'd suffer a bout of hiccups, making my belly jump, I'd just stare at it in listless guilt, rather than cooing and giggling like all the other mothers at my OB/GYN – every time you showed human qualities and life, I thought of Freddy driving his blades through your head, or stomping your throat with his boot, or just flat out leaving you in some pocket of his world to starve and shrivel away. Towards the end of his stay with me, Quentin smiled less and paled more; he stopped buying baby clothes and started eying the door... he would say that I had forgotten all joy in life, that I had lost my fighting spirit, and I'd ask him if he remembered that he was going to die... to which he didn't respond – he only frowned into his coffee and told me that he had loved me once.

* * *

Quentin could have been your father, Dawn. He could've reared you and given you the love that you deserved, even if it meant night after night of me fucking Freddy and waking bruised and bloody. I would've done anything to have pictures on my mantle of you in Quentin's arms, all smiles and bubbly hair. Instead, one morning, he kissed me on the cheek and told me he was going to go buy milk and some magazines, and, when the door clicked shut, I stood in the bathroom and ran the bathwater and cried... because I knew that he wasn't coming back.


	23. Chapter 23

**Author's Note: Again, thank you for all of the lovely reviews. And, remember, suggestions are still more than welcome!**

* * *

Chapter Twenty-Three

I sat cross-legged with my belly, twitching and changing shapes as you moved, resting in my lap, and stared blankly at the laminated, twenty-eight-week ultrasounds. In the first photo, your foot was clearly projecting towards the spot in which the camera had been pressed, and, in the second, I could trace the curvature of your vertebrae as you curled up and sucked your thumb. The grainy, grayscale photos fascinated me – you were so small and constricted, a tiny human being pickled in amniotic fluid and incapable of taking so much as a feeble breath. I tilted my head and leaned back on the couch, grinding my teeth against the guilt of having thought of ending my life, knowing all too well that you couldn't survive in the distended stomach of a corpse, its head blown off and heart suspended. Ironing my hands over my abdomen, I tried to forget that and pretend that Quentin was like Freddy, a presence forever skating along the edges of my world, ready to delve back into my life at any moment. I pretended that he was only regathering himself, that soon he would return to me... I've caught myself thinking that to this day, because, after all, you are Dawn, the beginnings of light, and I created you, so I must be some sort of sun... why couldn't Quentin be a planet caught in orbit, destined to come full circle? It's a pretentious and silly thought, but sometimes I cling to it.

* * *

I found myself soon after, alone, in a part of the boiler room that I'd never been in before – it was a cramped room, pipes knitted through its ceiling and a long, splintered work bench running down one of its walls. I saw unfinished variations of Freddy's glove strewn across the bench, along with some scraps of metal, a worn grinding stone, and frayed squares of leather. It seemed almost funny that, in a world where Freddy controlled so much (though certainly not everything) he would spend his time crafting things that he could probably just think into existence. I walked over to it, pulling out the drawers, finding only a few stray screws and rags crisp with grease and what I feared was blood – in fact, it wasn't until I reached the drawer closest to the doorway that I found anything worth unfolding and holding under the opaque light. It wasn't made from leather, but a soft, cottony fabric, crudely cut and stitched together, and, at first, I couldn't discern what it was due to its lopsided nature...

I flattened it out on the bench top – it was a reddish-pink with five holes snipped along it and plastic buttons poorly sewn down the front, but, no matter how long I stared at it, I just didn't understand...

"Anyone ever tell you that snooping like a nosy, little bitch is rude?" I heard him rasp from behind me, making me slam it back down and spin full circle to face the lanky form leaning in the doorway.

I gripped my stomach and stared at him, stiff and bewildered, "I'm sorry..."

"What's that?"

"I said that I'm sorry," I whispered.

Instead of approaching me, he just tilted his head up and lifted his hat's brim to make eye contact with me, "Hm."

"I didn't mean to... I just..."

He eased off of the door frame and loped casually towards me, fitting his pointer finger under my chin and tipping my head up, "Don't go through my shit."

He brushed his lips against mine, "Or I might have to cut off your pretty, little fingers."

I didn't respond, so his hands, the right suddenly gloveless, crocheted their fingers between mine, and he stepped as close as my swollen stomach would allow, kissing along my hairline.

"You know," I said softly, almost bitterly.

"Hm?"

"You know that he left."

His left hand departed mine and found its place winding through my hair, cradling the back of my skull, "Yes."

"That's why you're acting like this..."

He snorted, gripping my face again and turning it this way and that, shadows playing across my features in different shapes, like ink blots changing with every flip of a psych card.

I glanced over my shoulder, "That's... cute."

"Hm?" he grunted and looked at the misshapen onesie.

"I mean, if it was meant for a mongoloid."

That time he did laugh and, for a split second, I saw a genuine smile warp his obscene visage, before he picked it up and tore it along the seams, letting it flutter to the dingy floor.

"Your gloves... they're so, I don't know, _well-made._ But you can't sew?" I asked timidly, trying, for the first time, to have a normal conversation with him.

He stomped it, "Heart wasn't in it."

There was something vile about the fact that, when fixing together blades and leather for splitting throats and arteries, his heart _was_ in it.

"Oh."

We stood in an awkward silence, before I cleared my throat, "It wasn't you that made him leave, you know... it was me."

He eyed me, "I can see that."

That stung, but I didn't let my face twitch and show it, "I made him, I mean."

"Oh?" he sounded amused. "You _made_ him."

"I did."

"Not on purpose, you didn't."

I opened my mouth to lie, but thought better of it, "I couldn't make him happy."

"Don't know how to tell you, kid, but I don't give a shit," he laughed grisly, eyes shifting around. "Why the wimpy, little fuck walked out on you doesn't much matter to me. All I care about is that he did."

I pursed my lips, "Why am I here?"

"Because I think I was wrong. See, this whole... _experience_ has made me realize I really don't much like sharing, so I thought maybe we lay down a few ground rules."

My face hardened, "You don't have a say in-"

He slammed his hand against the bench, "_No._ See, I _do._ No more fucking curly-haired, little boys running in and out of your apartment, got it? Now, who fucks you right?"

I almost quivered when he shouted at me, but I refused to respond with a meek "yes," refused to docilely peer at my feet and give in.

"_Fuck you._"

He roughly grabbed my arm and dragged me towards him, "_Who fucks you right?_"

"_No one._"

"Lying little cunt-"

"Quentin."

"_What'd you say?_"

"Quentin fucked me right."


	24. Chapter 24

Chapter Twenty-Four

His right arm reared over his head, blades aiming towards my jugular, winking in the growing blaze of red and rubbing together spastically like cricket legs. I felt my entire body slacken, loosening in preparation for the plunge of his glove – I was afraid, but tired enough to accept it... I imagined my corpse moldering for weeks on end before my neighbors finally called the foul stench in to the authorities, the police breaking down my door to find a body covered in feces and blood, my once pregnant belly sunken in from decay. I squinted my eyes shut and waited.

"Do it," I whispered.

I cracked one eye open and saw him easing back on his heel, shaking in a weird manner, as if he was restraining himself, pulling his muscles together so tightly that his bones might creak and fracture.

"_Do it,_" I repeated. "You have to kill me... if you just hurt me, if you just cut me, I'll _never_ forgive you. No matter what, _I'll never forgive you..._"

He was breathing strangely, huffing in and out as he quivered, arm still poised over his head.

"_Do it!_"

Freddy's hand slashed through the air, cleaving into a part of the work bench softened by a dripping pipe.

"_Don't fucking tell me what to do, you stupid bitch!_" he screamed, jerking his hand out of the wood and slapping me across the face with the opposite one. "_You're not in charge here!_"

"_No one is, you bastard!_ You think we have _control?_ _You might control me, but you sure as fuck don't control yoursel-_"

"_Shut the fuck up!_"

"_No!_" It was my turn to sock him, square in the jaw. "_I'm tired of shutting up! I'm tired of you!_"

His mouth narrowed to a line, "If you say one more thi-"

"I have nothing left," I cut in, my voice lowering. "I have nothing left... I don't care what kind of punishment you give me, so long as it kills me."

"That'd be too-"

"What? _Easy? _I'm tired of your excuses! You keep me around because I fucking _amuse_ you, _because you're as hollow and useless as I am._"

His eyes were trained on mine, blue and void and shiny.

"Why do we exist, Freddy? To make each other miserable? To ruin people's lives? We have _no purpose,_ yet we keep going. Why do we keep fighting and fucking and rewinding when we both know we're just gonna end up here, until you finally decide to stab me instead of the work bench? And if you don't do that, we both know I'll pull some sort of trigger some day..."

"You'll end up here-"

"You don't know that; neither of us do... Face it, we don't know anything."

His shoulders were still raised, arched aggressively, and his hat still veiled his face, but he spoke, "Why do you do it?"

"Do what?"

He paused, "Forgive me."

My gaze was a depth-less one, a mining shaft without a bottom, no miners to make them laugh or sing, no picks to make them glint with light, "Because I don't have anyone else to forgive."

Gnawing his tattered lips he shook his head and, for once, I don't think he was grinning jeeringly as he did it, "You're wrong."

"Who do I-"

"You're saying that I don't know anything but... I know one thing."

I could feel my face's flesh paling, turning hoary tints as I began to walk past him, "I don't care."

"I know that it was always you, Nancy."

I stopped in the doorway, smoke receding.

"You were always the one I wanted... none of the others mattered. They didn't give me any satisfaction, or drive, or purpose... it was always you."

I turned back briefly to reply, "I don't care... because I never had a say in who it would always be for me."


	25. Chapter 25

Chapter Twenty-Five

I sat, legs spread, leaning against a body pillow rather than the breathing chest of a dutiful father-to-be, loudly inhaling and exhaling with the staticky, lamaze videotape.

"That's right!" the girl squealed in her ridiculous, neon jumpsuit, hair oscillating back and forth in its side-ponytail. "Hee-hee-hoo-hoo! In, out, in, out!"

I mimicked her, minus the flashy garb, and tried to focus solely on the air passing in and out of my windpipe – anything was better than thinking of him telling me in that gravelly, throaty voice that it had always been me, despite everything he'd done... despite all of the torture and hell he had put me through, he was trying to tell me what so many people can effortlessly whisper between bedsheets, over phone lines, through no space at all... My stomach jumped as you began your latest bout of hiccups and I sighed, tipping my head back, silently grateful for the distraction you so often unknowingly delivered.

"Keep it up, ladies! Hee-hee-hoo-"

At first, I thought that the rainbow contrails that began following the instructor's turning head and flopping hair had to do with my eyesight, strained, perhaps, from training on the television screen for too long. But, slowly, I recognized the strange sensation of nearly dropping into sleep and then dropping farther, as if my spirit was falling out the back of my skull... it was a sensation that I had become apt to notice, something that newcomers to Freddy's warped world of churning steam and boiler fire hardly felt at all. I heard the creak of his footsteps in the hallway, testing the floorboards in the doorway and, if possible, hesistating. My back strained when I used the couch to heave myself from the ground, placing my hand under my stomach to support the increasing heaviness, and turned to him.

His lanky shape was shrouded in unnatural shadows as he leaned with his spine against the doorframe, hands behind his back, head tilted up and away from me. His mouth hung open slackly in that way it always did, buck teeth getting their own silhouette, and neither of us spoke for a long gap of time.

I thought, not only in the back, but in the forefront of my mind, that I should hate him... hate him for the way he made my youth a bitter taste in the back of my mouth, for the perpetual abuse, for the drawings we made together on his walls, drawings that only children understood... but, for some reason, I couldn't. All of that seemed to be part of a distant past that wasn't even mine – I hadn't willingly forgiven, I'd forcefully forgotten.

"What do you want?" I asked stiffly.

He didn't respond, just closed his mouth and sucked in his already sunken cheeks.

"Answer me."

"Nothing."

"Don't bullshit me, you always want something."

He blinked down hard, as if the answer was stamped within his eyelids.

"Nothing."

"Then leave me alone," I ordered wearily, walking back to the couch and finding the video frozen. "And stop fucking with my TV."

I didn't even feel true anger, just a dull agitation, not because I was used to it... I was just so _tired._

The cushions shifted when he seated himself next to me, and we both stared blankly at the TV, a canyon between us. I could feel the couch sham rustle as his hand crept across to close the gap, and his fingers wormed between mine, scabby and long; when his thumb ran over my knuckle I looked down in the opposite direction. My eyes hung toward the floor without a focal point, throat constricting dryly; you squirmed and booted me in the ribs, sending a sharp pain up my side and making my stomach ripple noticably through my shirt. I gasped, and shifted to dislodge your foot, irritating you and just making your move more – Freddy looked over uneasily.

"I think you should leave," I whispered, extracting my hand from his.

Instead, he akwardly shifted himself closer to me and skimmed his hand over my stomach.

"It's moving," his breath dampened the fine hairs on my neck, face nuzzling behind my ear; he sounded surprised, uneasy.

My heart palpitated for a reason I couldn't quite pin down, and I fidgeted, trying to move my belly out from under his hand, only to have him push against it lightly in response. He worked his arm around the small of my back, pulling me against his chest, and kneaded the lower part of my stomach, before feeling his way up its side. You dogged after his fingertips, kicking and wiggling where he pressed.

"Freddy-"

He exhaled slowly, lips on my ear, "Did Quentin do this?"

At first I almost shoved off of him, before I realized that, for once in my lifetime he wasn't mocking or belittling me... he was merely asking, trying to do right by me just one time.

"Sometimes."

"Did you like it?"

"Yes."

"Do you like this?"

I hesitated, "I don't know... Part of me doesn't think so."

"I should leave?"

"Yes... I think you should."

It was then that I realized I was crying.


	26. Chapter 26

**Author's Note: Thank you all again for the wonderful reviews! Knowing that people are reading my story and being provoked to think by it is really awesome, and always inspires me to continue writing.**

**Now, with that said, I feel that this chapter really requires an NC-17 warning. It contains a sex scene that's slightly more graphic and realistic than any other sex scenes I've previously written, so be warned.  
**

Chapter Twenty-Six

He didn't leave.

Instead, he leaned over and lapped up the bulb of my tear and the trail it'd left behind; his hand moved off of my stomach and down to my thigh, and he started to chew my lips, sticking his tongue into my mouth when I tried to inhale. He didn't understand how to comfort me, how to outwardly empathize with the women whom his child was growing and kicking inside of... the only thing he knew how to do was strip me naked and fuck me until I couldn't see straight, couldn't cry or think of Quentin, couldn't tell him to leave or wish for better days.

My tears dried and my living room melted into a distorted version of itself, the couch angling oddly and the walls wavering, the TV screen going blank and black. I didn't even realize what was happening until he was behind me, naked, kissing and sucking between my shoulder blades, his left hand reaching around to feel my breasts or flick my clit. I flattened my forehead against the arm of the couch and balanced on my hands and knees, my stomach hanging low, heavy and sack-like, as he started to buck into me, hips bouncing off of my ass. I didn't moan theatrically or jerk myself back to meet his thrusts, I just breathed sticky breaths and felt my vaginal walls clench dutifully around his cock... he, however, groaned almost _too_ noisily and panted wetly, licking the salt off of the back of my neck and grunting commands under his breath.

"Come on, kid," he growled. "_Come on._"

Forehead still furrowed against the armrest, I moved just enough to barely satiate him, moaning on command and telling him to fuck me in an unconvincing monotone. His fingers knitted between the roots of my hair and tugged roughly – I yelped, but he just snorted in disapproval.

"What do I need to do to make you like this, huh?" he hissed behind my ear. "If I wanted to fuck a corpse, Nancy, believe me, I would."

I still didn't respond, making him clamp down on my hips forcefully and drive in further than he ever had before, spearing roughly through my g-spot and bumping against the mucus plug that protected my cervix. I screamed and tried to free myself, but he just grabbed a fistful of my ass and cemented his grip, leaning over to drag his teeth down the outline of my vertebrae.

"_Freddy, stop!_" I begged as he did it again. "_Please! I'll like it!_"

At this, he lessened the depth of his thrusts, pulling out whenever he made friction between his length and my g-spot, and I rocked backwards to re-envelope him in return.

"Quentin do this?"

I shook my head, my arms quivering under the strain and innards flaring with a pleasure I didn't want to have.

"Of course not," he panted. "Probably wasn't big enough to go this deep."

As if to prove this, he embedded himself deeper, scoring the length of my g-spot and making me moan uncontrollably... and then, just as suddenly, he pulled out of me entirely. I heard him lick his uneven lips, before he stamped them down my spine, kissing briefly between the dimples on the small of my back, and reaching down to tilt my hips upwards and part my folds.

"What are you do-" but he cut me off, twirling his tongue over my stiffened clit and burrowing his forehead against my backside, making me sputter and tip forward.

His labored breathing made me ache, and he seemed to be making an obscene mission of licking up all of my juices, before prodding his tongue inside of me. The more he worked at it, the more I realized that this was Freddy's idea of _comforting _me: fucking me animalistically, like I wasn't seven months pregnant with his doomed child, like he was still genuinely attracted to me; eating me out like the man that I loved hadn't abandoned me, and the one that I hated wasn't all that I had left.

When I did finally come, I only had a brief few seconds of bliss and thoughtlessness, before I wound down and felt sticky, excess fluid spilling out me, something he went to work licking up. Thinking about what he was doing made my stomach churn out of disgust, and I tried to pull him up, but he swatted my hand away and cleaned me off, before sitting up and wiping my shine off of his mouth with the back of his hand.

"Did Quentin do that?"

He almost sounded like a child, ugly eyes fixed on me for approval – in that instant, I saw a glimpse of the human Freddy, of the man who really had only related to children, who had always asked for my approval on his wall drawings and the way he fondled me.

"No," to my surprise, I laughed weakly. "I don't think anyone does that."

He laid out alongside of me and started gently sucking and licking my neck in what I suppose was a strange attempt at affection. I cupped the back of his ruined, scabby skull in return, as he nipped my jaw line, and realized that, for first time, he hadn't come at all.


	27. Chapter 27

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I couldn't run, yet, all the same, I found myself waddling as fast I could towards the shrieks and sobs that echoed down the halls of a preschool I would have done anything to forget. The spectral, childish remains of everyone – Kris, Dean, those whose names I barely recalled – skittered from one classroom to the next, giggling behind their hands, bows bouncing and shoes squeaking. Crayon and fingerpaint drawings of houses and kittens and stick figures flapped on the walls, stirred by a breeze that wasn't there, and the giggling grew with the screams. As I passed each classroom, I caught glimpses of children playing hide-and-seek behind the comically small chairs and desks, and felt a horrid, sinking feeling that you were going to spend your childhood doing the same, only your cheeks wouldn't be rounded by a smile... I walked faster, turning a corner and finding tiny spatters of blood blinking under the cold, bluish light – a crumpled shape tripped out of a doorway up ahead, knocking against the wall and reaching an arm towards me.

"_Get out of here!_" she sobbed, four, all too familiar slashes on her arm spitting out blood. "There's a man-"

I rushed forward and grabbed her other arm, pulling her back the way I'd come.

"He'll come after you, too-" she feebly protested, face slick and shiny from sweat or tears, I wasn't sure.

"He'll come after me either way. Now shut up and come on."

I lead her through an exit which opened into the playground – snow flitted lazily through the air and our breath left our mouths in fluffy tufts.

"_What's going on?_" she begged. "_Where are we?_"

I ducked with her behind the slide, "We're sleeping."

"We're... we're what?"

"Sleeping. This is a dream."

"Wait, then, none of this matters?"

"I didn't say that," I warned.

"But that doesn't make-"

"Do you want to die?"

"No!"

The snow was wetting my clothes and I shivered, tightening my sweater and worrying about whether or not you were still warm inside of me.

"I'm Carla," she said softly as I peered over the slide.

"Nancy."

"Who-"

"His name's Freddy."

"What the hell does he want from me?" she sounded like she was going to cry.

"Your fear," I whispered. "He wants you to fear him, because then you believe in him."

"I don't understand..."

"I'm just telling you what I know."

"And what..." she paused. "What does he want from you?"

I hugged myself tighter, "God knows."

"But... you're pregnant," she stated quietly.

For some foolish reason I had wondered if she noticed.

"So?"

"Why would he go after a pregnant women, that's..."

"What? Wrong? He doesn't exactly have morals, though he's not really... after me."

"Then why are you hiding?"

"To protect you."

"Is it a boy or a girl?" she asked, clearly nervous and trying to reroute her focus.

"I don't know."

"Oh, do you and your boyfriend want it to be a surprise?"

"Boyfriend?"

"I'm sorry you just- well, you don't have a wedding ring."

"I don't have a boyfriend."

"Oh... I'm sorry... does the dad know, or..."

"We should get moving," I roughly grabbed her hand and pulled her past the Badham sign, which was battered in snow, and down a winding side street.

We stopped behind some bushes and I craned my neck over them, "He knows we're here."

"How do you know?"

"This is his world... If he hasn't figured out where we are yet, he will soon."

We went a little farther, and, suddenly, we were on Elm Street, a place to which I'd promised myself I'd never return. I couldn't let myself freeze up, though, for the sake of a girl I didn't even know.

We cut through Kris's backyard, stepping over her dog, his corpse swollen with maggots and gas, and under the trellis-archway, its roses crumbly and black.

"Where are we?"

"Don't you... live on Elm Street?" I asked, slightly surprised.

"No..."

"Have you ever?"

"No," she sounded frustrated. "I've never even heard of it."

"Then how does he know you..." I asked myself more than her.

"I don't-"

"_Shh,_" I pulled her behind a bench.

His silhouette was loping idly back and forth on the lawn, and, having known him long enough, I could tell by the way he walked that he was more than a little amused. There was a hungry spring in his step.

She wiggled closer to me, quivering from more than the cold, and, without thinking, I put my arm around her, and began stroking her hair when she leaned onto my shoulder. I glanced up again and he was gone – without thinking, I hoisted myself up and dragged her along with me towards the porch's double doors, latching them behind us more to put her mind at ease than anything, and urging her up the stairs. I locked Kris's bedroom door, and, as Carla nervously tinkered with some of the figurines on the dresser, I pulled the comforter on the bed back to hide the blood stains.

"You should sit down."

"I'm fine," she assured me weakly. "If anything, you should sit down."

Instead of arguing, I seated myself and felt some of the nagging strain leave my back.

"Where are you from?" I asked, trying to discern why Freddy had picked her of all people.

"Akron, Ohio... You?"

"Springwood, Ohio."

"How pregnant are you?" she struggled to ask conversationally, pushing back her nerves, still quaking.

"Seven months."

"Oh... wow."

"Yeah."

"I always wanted lots of kids."

"Hm."

"Yeah, like four or five..."

I shrugged, "I never wanted any."

"Really?"

I shrugged again and wondered how long he was going to bide his time.

"Do you really like... feel it _move_ and stuff?" she seemed to be forgetting the danger as she came to sit by me on the bed.

I twiddled my thumbs, "All the time."

"What does-"

Just as she started to speak, the door exploded off of its hinges, colliding with the wall across from it and splintering violently. She screamed hysterically and tried to leap off of the bed, but I clutched her to me, knowing that she'd just be jumping into his line of fire.

"Nancy," he mocked gravelly. "You're being motherly... that's cute."

"Shut up."

"Don't be like that, I thought we had a _good_ time yesterday."

I flushed, "_Shut up._"

"He _knows _you?"

"I know _all _of her," his voice sounded slimy and perverted.

"What does he-" she started.

I pushed myself off of the bed with some difficulty, "Who the fuck is she to you, Freddy?"

"Aw, is Nancy jealous?"

"_Who is she to you, Freddy?_" I repeated angrily.

"A nice piece of ass," he jeered.

"Stop fucking with me, you sick shit!"

He flinched, "You wanna know what she is, _huh?_ Come here, you little cunt."

He beckoned aggressively to Carla, and I sat back down, pulling her against my chest and scooting farther down the bed, training my gaze on his.

"Now's not the time to be a mommy, Nancy," he snapped. "You should worry more about being one for our little brat, anyways."

I felt Carla bristle in my hold, "What does he mean?"

"Carla-"

Freddy was getting annoyed – I could tell by the heavy steps he took, by the way he rapidly rubbed his blades together.

"Bitch, I'm not asking again."

"_Leave her alone!_"

My shouting seemed to stir him, because he threw aside his usual toying and, within a second, he lunged forward, his blades spearing without hesitation through her yielding throat. Jugular blood showered on my face and I shrieked, sprawling backwards under the red, red rain, as he dislodged his hand and stared at me.

"You know better, Nancy."

"Why do you always fucking pull me in when you're going to do... _to do this? _Oh my god... _she was just a stupid kid,_" I knew he didn't care what I was saying, but I couldn't stop sputtering. "_She wanted four or five kids, and... she was just... her name was Carla and.._."

"Don't forget," he snapped, interrupting me.

"_What?_"

"You're making me fucking _soft. _There'll _never _be another yesterday, Nancy, and don't you forget it," his dirty, buck teeth jutted disgustingly.


	28. Chapter 28

Chapter Twenty-Eight

"_Nancy?_"

There were white spots swimming in the black, like glowing fish in the bottom of the ocean.

"_Nancy?_"

Her voice was distorted, as if passing through miles of water to reach me. Waves were rocking me- no, she was shaking me.

"Nancy, come on, we've got customers waiting!"

"Wha-"

"Listen, if you have so much going on that you can't even stay awake, just start your maternity leave a little early," Hillary snapped. "Maybe you'll actually have your shit together by the time you get back.."

"A few months isn't long enough," I muttered, returning to whipping the batter I had dozed over.

"It's better than nothing..."

"You want me to go?"

She shifted uncomfortably, "I just don't feel like you're benefiting us much right now... But, more importantly, you're definitely not benefiting yourself. A few months really could-"

"Please don't make me leave."

"Nancy, just listen, okay? Sometimes, when you have kids, you have to face some things that you'd rather ignore."

"Why?" I demanded, before realizing how selfish I sounded.

"Because if you don't, then they might have to."

"You don't know-"

"Do not tell me what I know. I spent a whole lot of my goddamned life having to face all of the horrible things that my mother wouldn't. Any issues that she had with my father, _I _had to try and fix – _I_ had to try to be the grown up by the age of _four._"

I didn't know what to say... I just sort of stared at her, not knowing how to tell her that she had just made me realize that I was preparing you for a childhood even worse than my own, without even knowing it, I was willing to give birth to you with my back to him, even though that would make it so much easier for him to reach around and skewer you with the brunt of it all.

"Please just take the leave now, Nancy."

But I couldn't.

* * *

It smelled just as dank and was as slippery with shadows as I remembered, its darkness punctuated by the outlines of a mattress and overturned paint cans and loose leaflets of paper. I felt a horrible, despairing feeling as I sat up and swept my hand over my stomach habitually, for, standing across from me was... myself... tiny and breakable and looking washed out in a frilly, white dress, its skirt bubbled and sleeves bowed. I watched myself stick my teeny hands into the only upright paint bucket and draw them out, sticky and pink, before smearing them in senseless shapes across the gray walls.

"Hey," I whispered to myself. "What are you doing?"

Little-Me grinned excitedly, "Paintin!"

"Why are you here? Didn't your mommy ever tell you not to go places with strangers?"

Her eyes stared uncomprehendingly at me, "Freddy's not a stranger."

I clenched my fists, "Yes, he is! You don't know him at all-"

"I play with him every day!"

"That doesn't mean you know him!" my voice trembled with oncoming tears. "She just never told us... she never told us how to protect-"

"I want Freddy to be surprised when I get back! I want him to tell me how good this is!"

There was something pure and gleaming in Little-Me's eyes, something clean and wholly untouched – I was looking at myself before he crossed the line that no adult should ever even toe with a child, before he tied the first binding around a body that didn't even know what such a binding was.

"How about you go back upstairs, and, when I see you later... I'll tell you how much he loves it."

Her eyelashes flared open and she tightened her lips together, "Do I have to?"

Just then your foot lodged itself in my ribs and I had to hold back from whining, shifting my frame to make you move lower, before stating firmly, "Yes."

She pouted, but turned tail and climbed through the shady opening, evaporating in an instant.

My eyes smarted with fresh tears, and I used my sleeve to absorb them.

"_Why am I here?_" I choked.

I thought, perhaps, that the shadows quivered, but, even if they did, they stilled quickly and offered no comfort.

"_Why the fuck would you bring me here?_"

"For you to remember," I heard him rasp softly from a dark corner I hadn't surveyed.

"Remember _what?_"

"That you started it," he stepped foot-first out of the shadows. "I'd only brought you down here once before but you... _you_ snuck down here on your own, tried to _surprise me-_"

"_Do not fucking blame me for what you did to me!_" I shrieked suddenly, and leapt up as quickly as I could, balling my fist to slug him square in the chest, only to have my motions slurred and slowed by his own personal brand of time.

He caught my fist in his hand and squeezed it painfully, before releasing it and letting it flop to my side. I could feel myself collapsing inwards – a tent mid-storm, a tripod, a house of cards...

"You played along," he insisted. "_You always reciprocated-_"

"_Fuck you! I _was the child and _you _were the adult – you _knew _what was going on! You _knew_ that the fucking _touching_ wasn't a game! _It wasn't my fault!_"

His eyes stayed placid and easily focused on my murky ones, "It was always about you-"

"Don't fucking feed me that! I was _four!_ I wasn't unique or special or _anything _that you led me to believe! I was the easiest target! A fucking child of divorce who didn't fit in, who no one wanted to play jump rope with, who was shy and knew how to _keep secrets._"

He didn't respond to that, just stared at me with an almost condescending look – _you silly, little girl, you're wrong. You think you're right, but you're just so wrong._

"Is that why I'm here?" I took another step away from him. "Is that why you put on that little show for me?"

His jaw tightened, "She's not a show."

"_She_ is _me-_"

"She's not a show," he repeated.

"You made her!"

"_I didn't make her_."

"_What the hell is that supposed to mean?_"

Just then I heard unearthly giggles and the scuffing of polished Mary Janes as the waist-high girls darted from one corner of the room to the other, seemingly born from nothing.

"They've always been here," his eyes followed them apathetically.

We watched them run rings around us, playing tag and duck-duck-goose, "But if you didn't make them... who did?"

"Nothing is 'made' here," he muttered. "Everything you see, they're memories... They already exist."

"So, they're memories that you can sometimes distort..." I tried to understand. "That's why you can't control everything... some of it's subconscious."

Little-Me looked at me, all big eyes and smiles and make-believe.

"But... this time it's you that's wrong."

He came up behind me, seeming abnormally gentle, and pressed his body against my back, arms loping around me, hands cradling my stomach. I flinched but he tightened his hold.

"How?" he challenged.

"Something was made here."


	29. Chapter 29

**Author's Note:** **I had to remove and repost this chapter, but not for the same reason as Chapter 28. It literally wasn't showing up for me and several others on the NOES fan fiction archive. A direct URL had to be clicked. I apologize because this, in combination with 28, is probably really confusing and irritating to readers. Thank you all for putting up with my stupidity!**

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The mattress's springs shrilled when I readjusted myself, lying in one bed while waiting to wake in another. Freddy was on the other side of the room, leaning over another one of his workbenches, metal clinking and paper whispering as he toyed with God-knows-what; I watched the memory-girls playing hide-and-seek, squealing and ducking behind chairs, running up and down the stairs. I tried to imagine that in my own apartment: a miniature person scuttling under the kitchen table, playing dress up with my clothes, racing me down the apartment building's steps... but I just couldn't, despite the fact that you already existed, that, at that very moment, you were moving ceaselessly, as you so often did when I stilled and my pelvis stopped rocking you to sleep. I wondered if you dreamed... of light shining through my uterine wall, of my heartbeat, of my voice or, God forbid, his...

As I pondered, the bare bulb swinging over our heads like a uvula guttered and I leaned back, trying to rest, though I was already asleep. You jerked violently then, making my stomach jump and sending shocks of pain through neighboring organs; I inhaled sharply and sat back up, clutching my stomach and doubling over. Freddy glanced lazily at me over his shoulder, rolling a partially-sharpened blade between his thumb and forefinger, and taking a few only vaguely curious steps towards me.

I gnawed my lips and whined, "Make me wake up."

He tilted his head and slipped his hand under my chin, but I slapped it away as his thumb brushed my chin.

"_Make me wake up, asshole._"

His hand shot back and gripped my throat, forcing my head to look up at him, "_What'd you say, cunt?_"

I feebly pulled at his wrist, "Nothing..."

He grunted, obviously not in the mood to play, and tossed me back onto the bed, sending awful pains flowering through my lower back; I worried for the way you were jolted as I fell. His mouth twitched as though he were about to speak, before he stiffly turned his back to me and went back to grinding his crude knife, foot tapping in aggravation. I absently looked upwards at the halo of ugly, yellow light radiating from the naked bulb, realizing that I felt no urge to cry or to fight, no urge to do much of anything at all...

I laid like that for a while, arms and legs spread, full uterus putting pressure on my spine, breathing slow and sad, until I felt something downy and gentle encircle my wrist: a little hand attached to an equally little girl, her saucer-eyes expanding dramatically when I turned my head to her.

"Yes?" I asked, trying to come off as soft rather than irritated.

"Hi," she said, eyes darting to the floor shyly.

"Hi... What's your name?" It wasn't until the words left my mouth that I realized what I had asked.

"Kris..."

I felt a nauseating pang of guilt... Kris and I had never been close, we were hardly even acquaintances, but there was something just so _wrong_ about looking at a dead woman through a little girl's eyes...

"Hi... Kris, I've- I've seen you here before," my voice shook a little. "I'm Nancy."

"Really?"

I sat up sorely, "Yeah."

"She's Nancy, too," without looking at me, Kris pointed towards a far corner where Little-Me was scribbling on the floor with chunks of fat, colored chalk.

I felt even sicker, "Yeah... I know."

"So, I need help with something real important..."

I tried to be friendly, tried to battle the need to vomit and scream, as she fiddled with the hem of her dress and clicked her Mary Janes together, "Yeah, and what's that?"

She grabbed my wrist and led me over to my past reflection, who was busy staining her tights green and pink as she crawled through the chalk dust.

Kris handed me a stick of sky blue chalk, "I can't do circles."

I glanced over at Freddy, his hands gripping either side of the workbench, his head cocked and body rigid, unmoving.

"You need me to draw a circle for you?" I asked in a slightly higher voice.

"Yeah! A big one!" her eyes were beginning to lock with mine and she flapped her arms excitedly.

I struggled to get down on the floor and then pressed the chalk to the cement, scrawling a slightly lopsided circle large enough for her to sit in – she plopped down in the center, reaching out and drawing orange squiggles around its outer edge.

"Why are you doing that?"

"It's the sun."

"The sun's blue?"

"Um, yeah, 'cause... 'cause the sun is on fire but the fire, when the fire goes out it matches the rest of the sky," she explained, brow crinkled over her work.

"Oh, well, you know, I didn't know that," I humored.

"Yeah, 'cause the sun, it's just part of the sky on fire."

"Then what's the moon?"

She looked at me matter-of-factly, "The moon's a rock. Everyone knows that."

I laughed, now kneeling with my belly resting heavily on my upper thighs, and leaned over awkwardly to draw sloping, green hills under her "sun." Little-Me scooted silently next to me and started drawing gray puffs, which I took to be clouds until she added legs and whispered of sheep.

"You know," Kris interrupted, original shyness having worn off. "My mommy, um, my mommy says that it's really sad when pretty girls get fat."

"Oh?" I tried to not get offended, reminding myself that she was a child, innocent at heart and simply repeating what she'd heard.

"Yeah, that's what she says."

"Well, I'm not fat."

"Yuh-huh."

"Nu-uh," I mimicked, mussing her hair. "I'm having a baby."

"Well, my mommy says babies get delivered by doctors, who bring them to your house, but Miss Hally, who lives next door, says that when a mommy and a daddy love each other a _whole _bunch, then a baby gets put in a mommy's tummy for a while... I guess that's what happened to you," she spoke so quickly that I stumbled to catch up, and, when I did-

_When a mommy and a daddy love each other a whole bunch..._

I didn't answer, and just wiped hair out of my face, shifting when my back started to throb and lifting my eyes briefly towards Freddy, who was thumbing through crumpled drawings that were probably mine, seated on the edge of his shabby bed. I excused myself as Kris continued to babble.

* * *

I awkwardly stopped a short distance away from him, realizing that I'd never really initiated _conversation _with the bastard, and, for a few moments, my mouth flapped wordlessly. He glimpsed at me from under his fedora, then returned to surveying the meaningless scribbles.

"Those mine?"

He grunted.

I carefully sat on the opposite edge of the mattress, feeling a returning ache that Quentin had left as his parting gift: the need to be held, the need to have fingers crotcheted in my hair and lips stamping kisses on my eyelids. The sudden sadness was probably from a surge of hormones, or, perhaps, from playing with ghost Kris and ghost-me, realizing that, soon, I would be doing something all too similar in my waking life, with no one to watch over my shoulder and smile, no one to make shaky home videos that he and I would coo over once you were asleep...

I uneasily reached over and toyed with the sleeve of his threadbare sweater and eased closer to him, resting the tip of my nose on his shoulder. He stiffened as I wedged myself against his side, guiding his arm to wrap around my bloated waist and leaning my head in the crook of his neck, smelling dead flesh and smoke and dirty fabric. And, as I settled and breathed, my mind began to flicker to the past...

_I was running across the playground, tripping, skinning my knee and bleeding, until Freddy swept me up in his arms with kisses, and promises of cartoon Band-Aids and lollipops and sparkly crayons... I was perturbed, trying to build a castle on the sand table, having it crumble within seconds, until Freddy came up behind me with a bowl of water – "you have to wet the sand or it'll never stick." I was alone in the time out chair, sniffling, picking at a scab, until Freddy snuck me a cookie and an Etch-a-Sketch, turning the knobs to draw a silly face._

_I was laughing-_

-I was crying, tears wetting his sweater, as his thumb slowly stroked up and down the side of my stomach, mouth resting against my scalp. I prayed in his hold that you would forgive me for the things that I had done, for seeking comfort in a monster, for crying over good memories from bad years... I prayed you that wouldn't hate me...

Please... don't hate me, Dawn.


	30. Chapter 30

**Author's Note: I want to say thank you to Zaerith-Chan for drawing an awesome picture based off of my story! It can be found in her DeviantArt gallery (same user name).

* * *

  
**

Chapter Thirty

If you allow yourself to be held, you put yourself at risk of being dropped, you let a foreign hand rock you into a false sense of security, and forget entirely about for what you must prepare: the fall that is always sure to follow a leap of faith. Just like no one can jump from a penthouse window and expect the clouds to catch them, I couldn't trust that I could hand my heart to your father and he'd take it in his left hand. I tried to, though... God knows I did.

* * *

I didn't wake for hours that night, either because Freddy was gaining a stronger hold on me, or because my body really was just that exhausted from the constant changes it was being forced to undergo. I laid on my side, curled up like a comma, my eyes scrunched closed, and listened to the sounds of chalk skidding down the rough cement and the memory-girls' giggling – two more whose names I didn't know and whose faces I couldn't recall had joined them. Some odd hours ago, halfway through my flashbacks and tears, Freddy's hand had stiffened without reason on my stomach and he'd unwound himself, before following the wall and ducking into the hole that led to some of the darkest moments of my life... He knew that I wouldn't follow.

A while later, however, as my hand began to prickle from my head resting upon it, I felt the bed springs shift and coil tighter as another body weighted down the mattress and filled the space behind me, a hand gliding down my side and coming to rest on my hip. When I felt his chest press against my back, I slackened instinctively, mistaking for a split second that it was Quentin, molding against my shape – I almost expected to feel Quentin's fingers tangling and twisting in my hair... Instead, Freddy breathed out in his gravelly, distorted voice and I remembered immediately where I was – I quickly looked over at the memory-girls and was relieved that they were huddled around their scribblings, paying us no mind at all... what we were doing felt so horrible and obscene.

Still, I let him tug me a little closer, let him rest his malformed lips against the back of my skull and rub slow, lazy circles against the swell of my stomach. I started to quiver and become unnerved in his steady embrace – sudden gentleness from Freddy always seemed to have a grim reason behind it: gloating after Quentin's departure, blooming anger being briefly masked, perverse wants. He had moved his head a little lower and was sucking at the back of my neck, one hand coasting up and down my arm as I tried to calm my jumbling nerves, the other, its arm underneath me, cradling the bottom of my belly.

I hoped that you had simply worn yourself out – your head was tucked underneath my lowest right rib and your feet were tapping lightly against my left hipbone – as you were only infrequently twitching and wiggling... but I worried that you sensed my anxiety, and dreaded thoughts of fetal distress and panic and heart strain flashed through my mind; slowly, you stilled entirely, turning my stomach into a quiet, pink surface, a bay that's waves had settled, and making me sick with worry. His hand slipped under my shirt, fingers pausing when they first felt the ridged texture of the stretch marks that had, in the past few weeks, begun to sprout across my stomach, before he traced them; I felt like a topographic map.

"You won't be half as nice to look after all of this, Nancy-girl," he muttered against my ear.

I flinched, "Fuck you."

He chuckled and rolled me onto my back, pressing a mocking, rough kiss against my cheek. I tried to jerk my head away, but he held me in place, one hand still resting against the bare flesh of my abdomen, and stamped a harder, dryer kiss on my lips, making me squint.

"Little Nancy," he grumbled against my ear.

_

* * *

He told me that it was what friends did as he brushed the frills of my dress's collar away from my face and started kissing the arc of my cheekbone, the dip of my jaw, before he-

* * *

_

-sucked harder on my lips, his right hand like a vice as it held my face in place, his left clasping my breast as he started to position himself over me despite my stomach, making me whine in discomfort-

* * *

_ -as he tested his first knife on me, just a gentle nick above my ass, and said that he was making me stronger, that, again, it was what friends were supposed to do. He made me bend over for the camera and, as the Polaroid flashed, I felt for the first time like I had done something horrible, something unforgivable-

* * *

_

"Stop," I whispered, barely audible. "Please, just... stop."

And, strangely enough, he did...

He eased off of me and fell back to laying at my side, face stiff and frowning as the memory-girls left up some endless, indistinct ladder and everything took on a blurry focus. I felt pulses of heat coming from nowhere and sweat droplets peeled down my skin; the walls were falling apart, stone curling like wallpaper and vanishing when it fluttered to the floor... Something was wrong, something was coming undone-

* * *

_-inside of me._

"_And remember," he smiled. "When friends do this it's special, it's like a secret, so we don't tell anyone about it, okay?"_

_My face was crinkled in discomfort, "Why?"_

"_Because secrets can only really be special if they're kept that way."_

_I didn't understand, but I wanted out of that stuffy basement, wanted to run up to the car pool lot and get lifted up by hands that weren't wont to wander, so I nodded, "Okay."_

"_That's my girl..."

* * *

_

"I hate you," I said, all tears and confusion and muddled feelings.

"I know."

"And you hate me?" I was feeling around with my words, trying to find a solid, definite place to stand.

"Yes and no," he held me a little tighter.

"And you love me?"

He didn't respond.

"You can't just say yes or no?"

"Secrets," he repeated from so many years ago. "can only really be special if they're kept that way."

I woke up in tears, having spent the last of my sanity on a baseless leap of faith.


	31. Chapter 31

Chapter Thirty-One

I hated the bus.

I hated the constant clinking of its fare and the whistling of its brakes and the blaring of its passenger's headphones. I hated the young men who fumbled awkwardly to offer me their seats and the old bitties who would scoot far too close to me, before resting their wiry, vein-laced hands on my stomach and trying to pass off old wives' tales about gender guessing and temperament prediction as medical fact. It seemed as though everyone felt that, as soon as I stepped out of my threshold, I was to surrender myself to the public as its property, for, more and more, foreign hands had begun to stretch out to pat or brush my abdomen – in the supermarket, on my way to work, when I was picking up my mail. To me, these strangers' fascination with my doomed pregnancy was as morbid as society's other hobbies, like rubbernecking over traffic accidents or staying up for late night specials on deformity and disease – I hated them for assuming they could approach me as if I was carrying a normal child, as if I was a proud mother-to-be swooning over nursery furniture and mailing off ultrasounds to relatives near and far...

* * *

The fact that a tiny human was growing inside of me was becoming more of a grim reality and disturbing concept as time progressed and I "popped" – it was a crude term that I had been introduced to at the maternal preparations class that I had attended once, but it was accurate nonetheless and really the only word I could use to explain the fact that I seemed to have woken up one morning to find myself looking _truly _pregnant_. _Suddenly, my navel was a sharp, outward-jutting nub and my skin was pulled taut, stretchmarks stenciled all over it like ugly, puffy, purple vines, and even your slightest twitches made my stomach ripple grotesquely. I found that, whenever I felt sharp jabs, I could see and feel your feet and elbows through my sheer skin, or press against my abdomen and find your cranium, your spine, your backside. Something about it had begun to make my skin crawl.

Yet, despite this growing distress and exhaustion, I continued to haul myself onto the bus and over to work, as useless as I had become, constantly nodding off in the kitchen and getting distracted by your kicks so much so that I forgot what the customer ordered before my fingers even ghosted over the cash register's keys.

* * *

"When they touch your stomach, you should reach over and grab their ass."

I laughed, surprising myself with the fact that it was actually genuine, and buried half of my face into one of his moth-eaten pillows as he laid behind me, his face tucked against my neck while he went about his usual perverse sucking.

"Great idea, but I'd rather not get sued for sexual assault..."

"They're the ones fucking molesting you," he prodded, not realizing the irony of his use of the word (or perhaps doing just that), his hand currently plastered against what seemed to be, even when he bordered on bouts of rage or sexual perversity, its constant resting place, despite my growing dislike of having attention brought to my bulge_._ "Gonna watch you, kid... next person to fucking touch you gets a hand through _their _goddamned stomach."

His right hand, which had been clasped around my hip, its blades glinting against my pelvis, glided down above his other, metal lightly poking my navel.

I shifted a little, lower vertebrae groaning, and hesitantly tried to move the weapon off of me by working my fingers between the sharp metal and holding the leather-encased hand, feeling the warped and knobby flesh of his wrist rub against mine, "It doesn't matter."

"Yeah, well, see, kid, that's where you're wrong. People need to realize what's their property and what is fucking _off limits._"

His hand had stiffened in my hold and weaseled out, moving back, suddenly glove-less, to massage my belly.

"I'm not your property."

He didn't answer, but went rigid in annoyance.

"And by your terms _you're_ molesting me."

I felt his heinous grin against the base of my skull as he chuckled in that rough, unnerving way, "Oh, I know."

He started chewing my neck again, and the room slowly flushed with heat, steam wallowing up in clouds like moths in a world without gravity; I recognized the stiffness pressed against my ass, and tried to wriggle out of the grip holding my back to his chest, but he simply constrained me more.

"Freddy-"

He was lapping behind my ear, "Come on, _babe-"_

"Do _not_ call me that," I snapped.

"I'll call you what I want," he said, roughly rolling me onto my back and in turn rolling onto his stomach, so he could fix his asymmetrical mouth against mine and briefly choke me with a tongue tasting distantly of rotted meat and smoke, hands slithering up to trace my sides and wring my breasts.

He eased off of my maw and mumbled gruffly, "Why do you hate that so much, huh? Quentin call you it?"

I shook my head too quickly.

"Oh, no, _he _did. And you dream of him, I know you do, dream of _fucking _him-"

"_Stop_," I whispered.

"I know how he fucks you, while you let him call you _babe._"

"I don't," I argued feebly.

"And he _always_ starts the same way..."

Freddy lowered his head and started not biting but _kissing _my neck in a way he never had, in a way that made me want to vomit and cry and slam his head against one of the bedposts all at once: slowly and wetly, with a trace of tongue-flicking at the end, identical to how Quentin always had back when that was the only kind of kissing I knew... And, rather than tearing my dress starting at its neckline, he gently eased one side of it downwards, towing his kisses down my bare shoulder and smiling when I flinched.

"Freddy, _stop,_" I demanded.

But he continued, working his hand down under my skirt, running it _tenderly_ (I still gag on that word) up my thigh and under my underwear, finger prodding around to find _it. _I whimpered and tried to push away.

"Next time you dream on your own," he groaned. "It's gonna be _me_ doing this to you."

His ring finger started making a pinwheel shape against my clit, sending a spate of pleasure that I loathed up my spine, clouding my brain and drawing forth sticky fluids that shouldn't have existed. When I closed my eyes, it might as well have been Quentin, and I felt sickeningly disloyal to him, the boy who'd walked out on me, as I held back from mewing his name and Freddy pushed my dress up to my throat. Kissing in that tickling-way that Quentin had, the way I'd always loved, in a curve down my ribs, my side, my stomach, he made an unnecessary groaning noise, trying to egg me on, before he stopped and rested his rough, crusty cheek against my protruding belly.

"Quentin never got this close," he muttered, more to himself, it seemed, than to me. "You remember that."

I didn't so much as utter.

"Who did this to you?" his hands suctioned themselves on either side of my stomach.

I clenched my jaw and refused to respond.

"I said '_who did this to you?_'" he demanded, wanting the pleasure of hearing me say it out loud again, violence riding on the edge of his tone.

"You," I answered begrudgingly.

"You can do whatever the fuck you like with this little brat after, but now..." he trailed off, pressing an eery kiss next to my navel, right above where I knew your sleeping head was tucked, that made goosebumps spring to life across my body.

He didn't have to finish, I knew what he meant, knew that he loved what you were doing to me, the way you were ruining my body and throwing my life off kilter... he loved that, every moment of every day, a part of him was inside of me, unintentionally controlling everything I did, depriving me of happiness and ensuring that I never wandered too far from him.

I don't think he loved you, though... but, then again, I can never be sure.

Slowly, he moved his head from my belly and looked up at me, and I saw that his brackish blue eyes were glazed over, that his face was all the more sunken as he gnawed on the insides of his ruined cheeks; he opened his mouth to speak, but his buck teeth just protruded in that unpleasant way that they always did whenever his jaw hung slack.

"What?" I asked, weak, defeated.

"Shut up..." he said, sounding strangely unsure.

"What?"

"Just shut up," he repeated.

"Why..?"

And then, within an instant, you became to me a real person...

"Because it's dreaming."


	32. Chapter 32

Chapter Thirty-Two

I didn't know how to respond, didn't even really want to consider the fact that he could see inside of your head as dreams shaped and bloomed inside of your still soft skull – could he reach into them? Could he warp you before the amniotic fluid even cleared from your lungs and you inhaled your first breath of air?

"It's dark... there's a little pink," he muttered. "Some tissue-looking shit."

He slowly ironed his blistered hands up and down the sides of my stomach, filthy teeth grinding against each other for a reason I couldn't pinpoint, as I stared up.

"Oh."

"I hear wind."

I exhaled with a shiver, "It's my blood circulating."

I wondered then if there was any fluid left thundering in his veins, or if it was all just powdered and crusted inside of him...Without thinking, my hands reached up to grasp his wrists and test for a pulse, which made him shake me off and draw back.

"Is there... I mean, is it _feeling_ anything?"

"Uh... something's slimy," he was growing uncomfortable, unaccustomed to any conversation between us that wasn't spiked with shouts, shoves, or I-hate-yous.

I could feel something slipping down along my uterine wall, a hand, maybe, or a foot – _slimy._

"That's not really what I meant..."

"No," he grunted, annoyed with my out-of-character ease with him. "It's a wad of tissue-"

"It has organs," I interrupted feebly. "And nerves and all that."

"That doesn't make it a person."

"Doesn't it-"

"Your friends still had organs," he whispered, pressing his ugly mouth against my hairline. "Even by the time I was done with them."

* * *

He was loping intestines around his knives the first time I thought you were coming, pinching his fingers together and quartering it into little, meaty bunches as I stood in the distance, my back to him, waiting for the atrocity to be over. My uterus had started tightening and hardening slightly, sending a slow and barely noticeable ache against my lower spine; you felt petrified.

"Freddy," I whispered, barely audible.

He was lathering a thin sheen of blood on his hands.

"Something's wrong..." he glanced over at me, uninterested. "I'm feeling pangs."

The blood slowly evaporated, swirls and helixes buoying off of his skin and vanishing into thin air, and he paced towards me, reached out to graze two fingers along my chin as I braced my stomach.

I expected him to wet my hairline with a barely caring kiss, or hold me stiffly against his itchy sweater, or at least say something sarcastic, something watered down with barely-there-sincerity... but, instead, his mismatching eyes just trained on mine, blue wells gone barren, ruined with broken blood capillaries rather than broken brick lining. His mouth was an unflinching straight line, an underscore to the rest of his expressionless face, before he slowly stepped back, arm dropping limply to his side, and turned around. He stopped halfway to the stairs, hands folded into his pockets, and the charred skin of his neck contorted when he turned his head to eye me from just under the ragged brim of his fedora.

* * *

The Braxton-Hicks contractions dulled and dissolved as I watched him walk up the scissor stairs, ascending them in the most human way I had ever seen and leaving me in the orange-flavored dark... alone.

I was alone.


	33. Chapter 33

Chapter Thirty-Three

"_Though no substantial leads have been presented to local investigators, many are beginning to believe that murders are linked, due to the fact that all crimes share the same M.O. and victim type."

* * *

_

I saw your father one last time before you were born, in Badham's playground, where the merry-go-round was spinning and swings were vacillating without any little hands to push them. It was nighttime, as it always seemed to be in his world (or, at least, until you came along) and the only sounds were the squeaking of playground metal, the crunching of snow under his shoes, and my labored breathing as I stood through another false contraction. "Any day now," my OB had told me. "Any day now." I eased onto a swing, surprised that it didn't snap under my weight, and trained my eyes on his gangly shade. His foot lifted, the atmosphere warped, and he was suddenly standing in front of me, head tipped down so I could only his upper lip as it twitched. My breathing hitched a little when I realized that the snow was growing spattered with red as blood dripped off of his blades, and a splash of red could be seen over his shoulder, staining a classroom window: he'd pinned them against it... I felt sick when I remembered that he'd pinned me against it once, too, in a very different way...

Neither of us spoke for a while; snow coagulated on the brim of his hat and you rolled and squirmed a bit, wind blew up tufts of snow and he reached his hand out briefly to skim over my hair. Finally, I broke the silence.

"You've been gone for a while," I said, hesitating. "I think that, maybe... it should be like that after I have it..."

The way he answered was so casual it made me grit my teeth, "I'll come around whenever the fuck I feel like it."

I could almost hear the plopping of the blood on the loosely packed snow.

"Why are you doing this?" I didn't mean to put such an angry edge on my words, but it was there all the same. "Why can't you just leave the real world _alone?_"

His uneven eyes narrowed, "_The real world?_ You think I'm not a fucking _part_ of it?"

"Dreams aren't real!" I spat.

"_I'm real-_"

"_Barely,_ and this?" I stood up unsteadily and waved my arms around. "_This_ is just a sad, little world made of nothing but warped memories, and you know what? _You're trapped here._ Tomorrow morning I'll wake up and I'll get _out_, while you waste your time _killing innocent people and harassing me just so you can make believe that you have some sort of major affect on the world-_"

His hand shot out and constricted around my neck, "_Fucking say that again, you stupid cunt!_"

I choked but muttered with what breath I had left, "_You may be able to come around whenever you feel like it to make my life miserable, but I'm not important. Nobody cares what happens to me!_"

And then he slapped me... hard.

* * *

And though he caught me when I started to fall, I felt no pathetic gratitude. Though he laid me in the snow that, for once, wasn't cold and pressed his face against my constantly twitching stomach, whispering that I was a stupid bitch (his way of telling me that I was irreplaceable) I felt only bitterness... bitterness that I was the one that he had picked, bitterness that my mother had chosen to dress me in that one dress he so loved for my first day at Badham, indirectly melding our futures into one warped and ugly timeline. I wished that my pigtail hadn't bounced to wistfully when I jumped rope that first day, that I hadn't shyly asked the gardener with the funny hat if I could play with his trowel, that I had gotten hit by a car when I crossed the street on my way home and lost hold of my mother's hand.

I realized then that I blamed everyone but one for what my life had become: my father for having evaporated as soon as I blinked, my mother for not knowing how to paste together a shattered child, and, most of all, Fred Krueger, for swinging the many hammers that had made such slapdash repair necessary.

I closed my eyes, and when my tears turned to snowflakes, I took a deep breath and added one more name to the list...

_Nancy Holbrook, for blinking in the first place._

_Nancy Hoolbrook, for pretending that the glue wouldn't eventually dissolve._

_Nancy Hoolbrook, for falling asleep on the head of a nail._


	34. Chapter 34

**Author's Note: And so we return to where we began... if you're confused, re-read the first few chapters.**

Chapter Thirty-Four

The first thing that I did when I got home was sit down at my kitchen table, skin ashen and eyes dull, and cry until I heaved. My hair became plastered to my cheeks by tears, and all I could do was peel it back and sob harder, my pelvis still aching and shirt bunching at my chest from sweat. I stared at the tabletop, which warped every time that tears obscured my vision like wet funhouse mirrors, until I heard the faintest murmur... I looked up through my soaking eyelashes and saw your two, mismatched eyes staring directly into mine from the carrier Hillary had given me, little, blue elephants dancing on its fabric lining, and it took me a moment to understand why that felt so wrong: a baby can't focus on one thing until around six months of age... but still you stared, and stared, and stared, your too-big eyes abnormally dry for some who had just entered the world. I wiped mine with the heels of my palms and reached out to brush my hand along your ugly, wrinkled face – you tilted your head slightly, but, otherwise, barely responded, your eyes slipping from my gaze to focus on the cat-shaped clock on my wall as its tail swung.

"Dawn?" I whispered.

You hands curled up a little in that way newborn hands so often do, and your pupils swung along with the cat tail.

"Dawn?" I repeated, and, this time, your eyes jerked back to meet mine, and I remembered how the first thing I'd mentioned when you were handed back to me was, "Look... It's like she recognizes me."

"No, dear," the nurse had laughed. "She won't be able to focus for the next few months. You'll notice her eyes dart around almost constantly when she's awake."

But they didn't... they stayed so unnervingly still.

* * *

The first few days that you were home, you barely made a sound, only mewing from hunger or having a dirty diaper, and, as time went on, I became increasingly uneasy about it – you were supposed to be constantly thrown off guard by the clarity of sounds, the feel of new textures, and the brightness of light not filtering through a uterine wall, rather than stoic, well-adjusted, and compliant. Stranger still, I noticed something else soon after I jotted down question after question for the midwife I barely knew: while you seemed oddly capable of focusing, you barely responded to outside stimulation. You showed almost no preference to being carried or lying in the crib that I'd bought you, being spoken to or left alone, being changed or given a bath. Your mouth just remained like a flatline and your eyes kept finding mine.

* * *

But it wasn't until you were three weeks old that I _knew _something was wrong... I was cooking sliced peppers in olive oil on my faulty stove, hair tied messily on the back of my head, and you started making a strange, little chirping noise. I glanced over my shoulder to find you were sitting perfectly still in your carrier, bumble bee blanket still tucked around you and slobbery binkie still resting on your lap. I went back to nudging the vegetables with my spatula, but you mewed again – I turned back to you, expecting that you missed your rubber binkie, only to see something I couldn't even begin to explain: your tiny hands were sticking straight and stiff out in front of you and your eyes were unbelievably wide, an incessant whine was coming form your mouth and your typically sharp focus was faraway and clouded.

"Dawn?" I asked uneasily. "Sweetie, what's wrong-"

Your face crumpled and you let out your first true cry, hands aimlessly flailing towards thin air.

"Do you want Mommy to hold you, baby?"

But, when I stepped in front of you, you only screamed louder.


	35. Chapter 35

**Author's Note: It's short, but I haven't updated for a long time, and I've really missed working on this story, so I figured I'd start with a small chapter to get my creative cogs whirring again. Enjoy!**

Chapter Thirty-Five

Even when I scooped you up, you continued to cry and writhe, tiny, pinkish hands waving in no specific direction. I turned around so you could face where you had been gawping and grasping at, and your enormous eyes seemed to balloon even more, before you did the unthinkable... and snuggled your little frame against my chest, staring as if entranced by something invisible. For some reason, something warmed inside of me, even though your wiggling closer probably meant nothing at all – after all, strange focusing abilities or not, how much did your brain really comprehend? You hadn't even reached a month of breathing air over amniotic fluid.

"What's wrong, baby?" I cooed, running my hand over your bald head, feeling the fine down that was already beginning to soften your scalp.

You kicked your legs aimlessly in response and your mouth, a ring of toothless gums, widened as you yawned.

"You sweepy?" I asked, unintentionally mimicking the maternal habit of baby-talking that I had once so detested. "Wanna nap?"

But you had already slipped into the other side... on your first trip into your second world.

* * *

I brushed your rounded cheeks, leaning over your whitewashed crib with the smiling-flower bedding, faded from having been washed one too many times by its previous owner – everything you had seemed to be a hand-me-down, except for what Quentin had bought you, of course; those onesies were folded in the back of a drawer, never to be worn. When my fascination for you slowly waned, I began to notice the way that the air grew balmy and the sulfurous smell that seemed to steam from the very walls. I was awake... I was positive that I was awake; I had been sleeping well and no micro-naps had broken up my days, but it was all too familiar-

A board behind me creaked, and I spun to face him.

Freddy looked the same, just as charred and disfigured and untouchable as before (though I had touched him... I'd left trenches in his scabbed back that were probably still there, probably just as unhealed and prepared to fit my low-bitten fingernails like a pair of good shoes), fedora tipped low.

"How..." I stammered, unsure. "How are you here?"

His somewhat dull and dazed expression seemed to suggest that he himself wasn't entirely sure, but still he raised his pointer finger's glinting blade and gestured towards your crib, "Brat's sleeping."

I didn't bother to hide my grimace, "She has a name."

He grunted in disinterest, wiping his blades against each other.

"I'm awake... aren't I?"

He shrugged, and I realized that, for the first time, we were standing together in my world, on my side of the coin.

"Dawn... I don't understand what Dawn has to do with this..."

He grunted again and loped passed me, running his hand over a nicked up nightstand decorated with the glazed animal ceramics that you would one day adore. He knocked over the pony and didn't right it, and, for some reason, I felt as though I would have preferred that he slashed my cheek.

"Don't fuck up her stuff."

His mouth contorted into a sarcastic, lopsided leer, and he looked over his bony shoulder at me, knocking over the elephant and chipping its ear – oddly enough, it would one day become your absolute favorite, even thought you cut your finger on it more than once...

"Fuck y-"

But I didn't get to finish... your soft and eerie mews interrupted my speech and, for the first tine, Freddy looked over at you.


	36. Chapter 36

**Author's Note: I'm sorry for the fact I had to delete and upload this multiple times. For some reason, whenever I upload to it _never _shows up. I mean _hours _will pass and it will only show up to people who get an e-mail alert. So, again, I apologize, because this has happened before.**

**Thank you all again for reading and for your lovely reviews!

* * *

**

Chapter Thirty-Six

Before I knew what I was doing, instinct drew me to lean over the side of your crib, my hands reaching out to scoop you up awkwardly – I felt like I was missing fragments of my maternal instinct, for holding you felt almost too foreign to be allowed. You mewed quietly and wriggled a little in my hold to get comfortable, before rooting against my chest, seemingly oblivious to the figure looming behind me. I lowered the shoulder of my shirt and unsnapped the uncomfortable confines of my nursing bra, hunching my shoulders to block his view and letting you latch on. The feel of breast milk being pulled down through the ducts in my breasts felt horrid, like pins and needles. I didn't know why I was nursing you right then and there, when all common sense told me to do otherwise, but I wanted a reason to put my back to him for probably the first time in years.

I felt him breathing wetly on the nape of my neck, the brim of his hat bumping against the back of my head as he peered over in a way that at the time I felt could only be perverse. His fingers brushed along my hip bone and you detached, a trickle of milk dribbling down your tiny chin. I wiped it with my thumb and you stared fixedly up at me, before your focus strayed over my shoulder.

* * *

He had helped to create you when we became the beast with two backs, had come to know the way in which you rolled and kicked as you grew inside of me, had cut your umbilical chord after the amniotic fluid cleared from your lungs and you drew in your first breath... only to evaporate almost instantly, becoming a phantasm in my memory and leaving behind only two signs that he had ever existed at all: shallow scars and you. After all of the suffering, the abuse and loss and fear, I would never love him or care for him or even really want him around, but still I felt a strange gap whenever he vanished. I thought of the woman who had lived almost her entire life with a two hundred and ten pound tumor, how she must have felt the strangest absence after it was removed and her skin was sealed. There was more confusion than relief, I'm sure, whenever she reached out to touch what wasn't there.

I will never know how I feel about the monster of a man who helped to give you life, and I don't think that I ever will... but those eyes of yours, the way that they locked on him, all mismatched and wide, told me that, though you mind barely functioned at all, it had been made up.

* * *

Introducing you seemed silly and romantic-comedy-esque. "Say hello to your daughter" was a line I expected to hear on a daytime soap when an estranged couple reunited for the first time, a new life drawing them together like moths to a porchlight at dusk. Instead, I just readjusted my shirt and turned to face him, holding you against my sore chest.

"Dawn," I said after a moment of silence in a hushed voice, not making eye contact.

He didn't say anything, just stared down at you in what I perceived as only vague interest.

I wasn't going to follow the soap opera format – I wasn't going to offer for him to hold you in his nasty, scabby hands, or tell him about how you stared and barely cried and let me sleep more than any other new mother I had met. I just held you and stared at him, while he looked down at you and his mouth twitched a little. You mewed.

"Her middle name's Gwen," I said.

His left hand lifted up and just sort of... rested on your head, seeming out of place.

"She was nine pounds," I whispered, as your stared up at him. "Nine pounds... I mean that's not _huge_, but it's pretty big..."

His fingers moved a little, feeling the fuzz on your head that would eventually thicken and turn the exact same shade of brown as my hair.

"She sleeps a lot," I started. "Have you ever... been in her dreams?"

"No," his voice was an unnerving rasp.

It was your first time in your second world, a child divided by more than a messy divorce or court papers... I wished it could've been that easy. I wished that your father was Quentin, even if he still ended up leaving in the end, because he would've known your name by heart, he would've bragged about how much you weighed and what a good baby you were, never crying. He would've loved you _so_ much...

And then I broke my own rule, overcome by that horrible and suffocating feeling of being completely and utterly alone, and, when his hand left your head, I held you out to him... only to have him step back.

I felt a cry bubbling up in my throat and held you out further.

"She's not heavy," I insisted, fighting tears. "And you won't break her."

And then we all woke up.


	37. Chapter 37

Chapter Thirty-Seven

It was like a film reel playing through an old-fashioned projector, for sometimes it skipped and sometimes it stuck, sometimes there were cigarette burns in the corners and sometimes they were spotless – yes, my shameful fantasies were constantly whirring through the spools of my brain. You'd be breastfeeding or scrunched up in your crib, and I would feel my fingers twitch with terrible thoughts, jumping with electric currents as I briefly considered driving far, far out of the city and just leaving you on the shoulder of some gritty road. Sometimes, I sat, knees pulled up to my chest, and thought about swallowing fistfuls of painkillers or letting you drift to the bottom of the bathtub until air bubbles stopped rising to the surface. There was a term for it, I knew... a term for the storm clouds that strained through my window panes and turned my world a flat and miserable blue, for that pit in the bottom of my stomach that was widening and widening and widening...

"Postpartum Depression," my OB/GYN had said, flicking through the papers on her clipboard and scratching out a prescription in the sterile, blank room. Medicine did nothing for me.

It was a bleary Sunday morning when it happened – you were nearing two months of age, laying belly-down on your baby quilt in the living room and shoving your fists in your mouth. I was scribbling down new recipe ideas for the bakery, where I found my enthusiasm to be waning, and half-listening to some loud, silicone-based reality show. You gurgled and furled your footie pajama-clad feet.

"What're you doing, Baby?" I asked dully.

I set down my pad of paper and wiggled over to you on my stomach, puffing away at a little farm of dust bunnies near the edge of your blanket, and put my face on the same level as yours, and that's when it happened... Your nose twitched slightly and your tea-time-saucer-eyes stretched open.

"What's goin' on? What's wrong?"

Then your tiny, toothless mouth curved upwards and you let loose a soft squealing... you _smiled_ at me.

I felt like I needed to say something profound or encouraging, to thank you for offering me this fragile gesture across the living room carpet for no apparent reason whatsoever.

"Oh!" I laughed. "Hi there! What's making you so happy, huh?"

Your smile faltered, then resurfaced as you grasped my finger.

"You just realizing I'm your mom now, huh?"

Your foggy eyes drifted like lazy ships over my face, past my head, and then stare towards an empty space. I felt my skin tingle and, suddenly, the air began to throb with hot, random pulses; your smile swallowed itself and I scooted over to roll you into my embrace.

"Not now," I whispered. "Not now, I know I'm not even sleeping..."

I glimpsed down at you and saw your pupils expanding, your irises up their knees in a frosty, unearthly film, and you felt ridged and heavy in my arms.

"What do you want?" I called, suddenly feeling anger well up inside of my lower gut – for the first time, you were doing more than acknowledging me, you were _wanting me_, and he was coming to unravel the closest thing that I ever had to a Hallmark moment._._

"Answer me, you fucking..." and that's when I realized that the room I was sitting in seemed off: it was just a fuzzy version of our own living room. The furniture and windows were out of scale and everything was primarily featureless – the wooden table had no grain, your quilt lacked stitching, and a decorative vase of drooping flowers that usually sat on top of the television was patternless.

Your cooed up at me and I realized that Freddy wasn't there.


	38. Chapter 38

**Author's Note: I'm officially back! Again, I apologize for the huge gap of time between updates, but I've been insanely busy. Also, the lyrics used in this chapter are from the song "I'll be Yours (4am Version)" by Placebo.**

Chapter Thirty-Eight

The world ended at our front door, muddling into sooty nothingness. I stuck my foot out to feel for a floor and realized that the blackness just fell into itself, a never-ending void, a black hole having eaten its surrounding stars. You wriggled in my arms, gurgling distantly, and every time you looked one way, almost everything else went out of focus, becoming blurry sketches of themselves as I walked unsteadily down the hall. Some things, though, kept their demarcated shapes – the clock whose hands you loved to watch, your ill-leaning crib, the colorful, plastic donuts I had given you to suck on.

"Dawn," I breathed, feeling a tepid air against my lips, and you looked straight up at me, giant eyes smoggy with sleep. "Dawn, wake up…"

I bounced you gently, even though I knew that would do nothing… Freddy had done far more to me in the dream world and I rarely awoke before he was ready to let me.

In some spots, the floor crackled beneath my feet like brittle hoarfrost or blown sugar, and I'd jump back in time to see a patch of floorboards crack into a spider web-shape, before caving inwards and revealing more of the bottomless pit. The ceiling at which you were staring intently seemed, by comparison, firm and had a rather lopsided version of its real-life molding – it looked safe to walk upon, if only we could… your thin dusting of brown hair felt downy beneath my hand, and I held you up to my face to nervously nuzzle you, smelling your scent of baby powder and fresh skin and diaper plastic. Your fat fingers reached up and, for one of the first times in your life, grabbed at my face, feeling my lips and feebly gripping my chin. My hair's silkiness seemed to enamor you, and I realized the world around us was fading away as I myself felt more vital to your dreamscape, more definite…

Instead of falling, we simply floated in the blackish space as you pulled the pads of your hands down my face, fingers, it seemed, too tiny to be real and nails microscopic. I wondered if Freddy sensed us, the ripple of our presence disturbing him at that very moment, or if this dream world was entirely separate, an entity standing, however neonatal, on its own. I kissed your forehead and you slowly lost your hold of me – instead of jerking free, I dissolved, gliding back into the real world as if you had not quite been ready to release me

On your quilt, you laid on your stomach, whimpering in your sleep.

* * *

That night, Freddy's world was as blistering as ever, and I felt sweat collecting on my forehead and under my arms. Pipes groaned as water and steamed tunneled through them, and the steel walls felt more _there_ than ever; his shadow curved up a far wall, winding to the dark reaches of the ceilings. Between my ankles, Little Me and Little Kris skittered, giggling and holding hands.

"Freddy," I said, my throat acrid and tender.

There were more bodies strung upside-down along the walls, gored and disemboweled, their intestines glistening as they rested upon their owner's pale foreheads. Freddy's nails screeched as he raked them through a thick coat of rust, back to me, right hand gripping a rail.

"How are you?" I asked, feeling silly as soon as I opened my mouth – _this isn't some book club friend you haven't seen for a while._

He looked at me from over his shoulder, eyes conical, before turning and sauntering over to me in that way he had in days of old.

"Where have you been?"

Again, he didn't respond, taking another step until we were toe-to-toe – I tilted my head and his lips felt almost familiar, fissured and dry, against my own. His tongue was just as repulsive as ever, but still I crooked my knees and sank to the floor, his left hand planted and scoring against the small of my back as we went. I laid down and there was no effort – I was detached, yet invariably there – as his blade skated along the seams of my nightshirt. My hand jerked up suddenly and grabbed his wrist.

"Things are different now," I exhaled, woozy-headed. "I don't think I'm ever… going to be the same."

He eased my hand off of his wrist and continued slitting the fabric, skinning away my outer layers and finding beneath them a body he had not before known and at which he, I presumed, mentally recoiled. Only two months free of Dawn, my body's baby weight had yet to flake away, clinging stubbornly to my hips and thighs and pooched stomach; my stretch marks had not vanished(never would) and my breasts, though always small, had drooped like weary bellflowers. Still, he shed his sweater and let his hat fall away, skin against hideous skin.

"_I'll be your water, bathing you clean,_

_the liquid peace."_

His belt clanked and I instinctively arced my neck at the sound, his two hands seeking my breasts, blades bumping my clavicle.

"_I'll be your ether, you'll breathe me in,_

_you won't release."_

I inhaled, steam kicking itself up sluggishly, and, when he slid into me, his world took on an alien, white cast. Pipes spit like threatened cats, and his face fit itself into the curve of my neck; there was no thrusting or rocking, but rather a slow rolling that barely made my backside lift from the pewter- and copper-colored floor.

"_Well I've seen you suffer, _

_I've seen you cry the whole night through,_

_so, I'll be your water,_

_bathing you clean_

_with liquid blue."_

He had nothing cruel to say to me and instead of carving up my thighs, which I knew with disgust had grown flabby, he pulled them tightly around himself, barely reacting when my breasts began to leak. I felt uglier than he for the first time, a planet left to become an unsightly wasteland after his daughter slipped from within me, and for one of the only times in our foul interweaving, he showed me kindness… kindness through saying nothing, through swallowing my breast milk and sucking for more.

"_I'll be your liquor, bathing your soul_

_in juice that's pure,_

_and I'll be your anchor, you'll never leave_

_the shores that cure."_

My false sense of security let my head bob in ecstasy, and he rooted his hands on either side of me, supporting himself above my stomach in the way that he had when the baby had been there – I fumbled along his scabby back and pulled him down against me, until even the tiniest universe couldn't have existed between our connected hips and fused chests.

"_Well, I've seen you suffer,_

_I've seen you cry for days and days,_

_so, I'll be your liquor, demons will drown_

_and float away."_

I felt the nerves inside of my birth canal squeeze together and then release, and I moaned quietly, his arms slithering under my back and making me arch my chest to his distorted mouth.

I don't know how much longer it lasted: maybe seconds, maybe-

"_I'll be your father, I'll be your mother, I'll be your lover,_

-minutes-

_I'll be yours…_

-hours-

_yours…_

-forever.

_yours…"_


	39. Update

I wanted to apologize to all of my amazing readers who have been waiting for an update for all these months. I've been very caught up in college and the like, but, now with things settled, three updates will be coming your way soon :).


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